The last couple of months have been quite busy for the team of Open Knowledge Nepal with lots of projects, workshops and events. In this blog, we try to summarize all the activities which were conducted in the past couple of months as part of our regular updates.
Empowering women
With the aim of strengthening and empowering women towards the Open Data Movement, In April we announced the 10 awesome Open Data Women Fellows. The women fellows have completed their training and one month’s placement at the respective host organization. They did lots of awesome works during the time of placement, and to inspire other women leaders we have started to publish the blog post covering their journey and experience. You can read the blog post written by the fellow here.
Marking the presences
Our CEO, Nikesh Balami represented Open Knowledge Nepal at two different international events. He joined FOSSASIA Summit 2019, Singapore and 2019 Creative Commons Global Summit, Portugal to give a presentation on “Grassroot awareness and Impact of Civic Tech in Nepal“, where he highlighted how Open Knowledge Nepal conceptualizes the open data awareness campaign to reach diverse people all around Nepal. He also briefed shared about how the different kinds of civic tech project of Open Knowledge Nepal, like Open Data Nepal, Local Boundaries, AskNepal and more, have impacted the lives of many.
Enhancing capacity
On the occasion of the International Open Data Day 2019, we organized a day-long ‘Open Data Expedition in Dang‘. The expedition has helped to empower the local youths of the Dang district, and many participants shared that this event was the first of its kind and these types of events are barely organized in their city. OKN was supported by the Data for Development in Nepal small grants program to mark Open Data Day 2019.
As part of the follow up training of Open Data workshop organized by Data for Development program and facilitated by the representative of Open Data Institute (ODI), Shubham Ghimire and Sagar Ghimire of Open Knowledge Nepal hosted two half-day open data training program at Pokhara and Kathmandu to implement and share their learning with a broader audience.
Exploring collaboration
To support the growing momentum of data, we recently committed to voluntarily contribute to the Nepal Data Literacy portal, developed by World Bank Nepal with support from DFID, to increase production and usage of data and statistics in Nepal. The portal consists of all the course materials, student workbooks and instruction notes used during the Nepal Data Literacy Program, which is designed to catalyze stronger data-driven decision-making by government and non-government actors (mass media, civil society, and academia) through targeted Data Literacy Workshop to help Nepal achieve its development goals.
To know more about Open Knowledge Nepal and its activities, please visit our website.
Nikesh is an open data advocate and tech researcher based in Nepal. He is a strong supporter of open source software and believes in the vision of Open Knowledge to empower citizens regarding technology usage and open data. He loves coffee chat, tweeting, hackathons, blogging, traveling, and open data. As an International Open Data Lead, Nikesh works closely with Open Data communities from all over the world. He also leads Open Knowledge Nepal, one of the active networks of OKF since 2013.
