This text shows a real case of how the Open Data Editor (ODE) impacted the workflow of an organisation working to serve the public good.
Picture of a municipal office in Tulsipur, Nepal, with IT staff reviewing datasets on a computer.
Organisation: Open Knowledge Nepal (OKN)
Location: Kathmandu, Nepal 🇳🇵
Knowledge Area: Local Government Data Management
Type of Data: Public infrastructure, education, health, energy
Open Knowledge Nepal (OKN) has been a pioneer in advancing open data literacy and infrastructure across Nepal since 2013. Their Integrated Data Management System (IDMS) project supports five local governments – metropolitan, sub-metropolitan, and rural municipalities – by aggregating siloed datasets into a centralised platform. However, with limited technical capacity and fragmented data sources, ensuring quality has been a persistent challenge.
The Challenge
Problem
- Siloed, messy data: Municipal datasets come from PDFs, surveys, and legacy management information systems (e.g., national census, HMIS, IEMIS, etc), often with inconsistent formats, missing values, and language barriers (Nepali/English mix).
- Zero data literacy: Most local government staff lack basic digital skills – some don’t even use a computer in their day-to-day operations. IT departments (often just 1-2 people) focus on hardware, not data.
- Resource constraints: OKN previously placed “data fellows” (trained youths) in municipalities to clean data manually, but funding ended recently.
Impact
- Manual error-checking took weeks per dataset, delaying critical projects like city data profiles (used for public services) and efficient data reuse.
- Low-quality data undermined trust in platforms like IDMS, where around 30% of datasets had errors (e.g., duplicate columns, null values, mismatched languages).
Although the Integrated Data Management System has taken the handling of data from Nepal’s municipalities to a new level (above), the data has not necessarily been subjected to quality checks before being made available.
The Solution
OKN integrated the Open Data Editor (ODE) into their workflow with local governments to:
- Automate audits: Use ODE to scan IDMS datasets (e.g., energy consumption, school records, health information, etc) and flag errors – like a 400-row dataset with 1982 incorrectly labeled as “सन” (used to represent “English Date/Year” in Nepali language).
- Standardise metadata: Added field descriptions, data types, and ownership details to previously bare spreadsheets.
- Replace manual labor: ODE reduced reliance on data fellows, enabling IT staff to validate data independently.
ODE detects a duplicate column in this spreadsheet with public infrastructure data.
Here’s a screenshot of different categories of errors in columns, labels and rows.
Nepali language-related errors identified by the Open Data Editor.
The Results
- Efficiency: Cut error-resolution time from weeks to hours.
- Scalability: Audited 40+ datasets across 5 municipalities in a short period, fixing 95% of various formatting errors.
- Capacity building: Translated ODE’s user guide to Nepali and initiated training sessions for municipal IT staff, which they believe can be “a game-changer for non-technical users.”
Quote
Nikesh Balami, CEO
“ODE solved two problems at once: it gave us a way to enforce quality without hiring experts, and it became a training tool for staff who’d never worked with data before. For the local governments, this isn’t just about open data – it’s about making basic governance possible.”
Next Steps
OKN plans to expand ODE to audit the city data profile of Tulsipur Sub-Metropolitan City, and advocate for its adoption nationwide as part of Nepal’s open government commitments.
Examples of city data profiles created with the Integrated Data Management System, whose accuracy was enhanced after using ODE.
About the Open Data Editor
The Open Data Editor (ODE) is Open Knowledge’s new open source desktop application for nonprofits, data journalists, activists, and public servants, aiming at helping them detect errors in their datasets. It’s a free, open-source tool designed for people working with tabular data (Excel, Google Sheets, CSV) who don’t know how to code or don’t have the programming skills to automatise the data exploration process.
Simple, lightweight, privacy-friendly, and built for real-world challenges like offline work and low-resource settings, ODE is part of Open Knowledge’s initiative The Tech We Want — our ambitious effort to reimagine how technology is built and used.
And there’s more! ODE comes with a free online course that can help you improve the quality of your datasets, therefore making your life/work easier.
Download Open Data Editor 1.4.0 using the following buttons:
↪️ Take the course: Learn how to use ODE
All of Open Knowledge’s work with the Open Data Editor is made possible thanks to a charitable grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. Learn more about its funding programmes here.
