This text, part of the #ODDStories series, tells a story of Open Data Day‘s grassroots impact directly from the community’s voices.
To celebrate Open Data Day 2025, as part of the Harnessing Opportunities to address Polycrisis through community Engagement (HOPE) project, the Nepal Institute of Research and Communications, in collaboration with the Ilam Municipality, organized a multi-stakeholder co-creation workshop discussing the poly-crisis and open data nexus. The event envisioned to raise awareness among students and data enthusiasts belonging to marginalized and indigenous communities about the disproportionate impacts of the poly-crisis by leveraging open data.
Hosted by the Ilam Community Agriculture Campus on March 6, 2025, the event brought together 40 individuals represented by municipality and ward officials, students belonging to indigenous and marginalized communities, civil society members, environmentalists and media personnel.
Key Activities
Introduction to open data practices and initiatives in Nepal
Through a participatory community workshop, the core concepts of open data was shared, alongside current practices and initiatives of open data in Nepal. Reference guides of Open Knowledge Foundation, the OKFN website and other open data community portals were showcased to the audience members.
Co-Design Session
Through the workshop, the participants also came up with some local issues that were considered significant to address the poly-crisis. These were categorized into 5 key themes viz. health services (including mental health), infrastructure (access to drinking water, road, electricity, tele-communications networks), biodiversity, disasters, and climate change.
Stakeholder Perceptions and Commitments
Speaking at the closing event, Mr. Naresh Shrestha, Ward Chairperson of Ward number 7, Ilam Municipality noted that access to findable, accessible, interoperable and reuseable or FAIR data is pivotal for decision-making. Shrestha also expressed commitment that his office, in collaboration with the Ilam Municipality and data advocates to generate and utilize open data to inform their policymaking and implementation processes.
Likewise, Dr. Yogendra Man Shrestha, the Chief of Ilam Community Agriculture Campus also thanked the event organizers for capacitating the young agriculture scientists regarding current trends in open data and how they can use these data to identify data pain points, articulate those pain points in the form of scholarly research and use them for advocacy purposes to address the poly-crisis.
Key takeaways and action points
Key takeaways from hosting this year’s event for NIRC include:
- There’s a dearth of awareness and technical skills set among all categories of stakeholders, even journalists and students to generate, interpret and use data in any form in the project’s site
- Despite lack of awareness and technical skills set, there is a genuine interest among the participants to know more about open data and how it can be useful to address day to day problems
- A Whatsapp based Community-led Action Group to continue sharing data gathered (Google map listing, photos, videos, other compiled data) to catalyze discussions, document poly-crises impacts, and recommend solutions to their respective wards and municipality
About Open Data Day
Open Data Day (ODD) is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. Groups from many countries create local events on the day where they will use open data in their communities. ODD is led by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and the Open Knowledge Network.
As a way to increase the representation of different cultures, since 2023 we offer the opportunity for organisations to host an Open Data Day event on the best date over one week. In 2025, a total of 189 events happened all over the world between March 1st and 7th, in 57 countries using 15+ different languages. All outputs are open for everyone to use and re-use.
For more information, you can reach out to the Open Knowledge Foundation team by emailing opendataday@okfn.org. You can also join the Open Data Day Google Group or join the Open Data Day Slack channel to ask for advice, share tips and get connected with others.
