Category Archives: OpenDataCamp

Open Data Camp 2016: Pollution Party! Full Schedule

REGISTER TODAY! We have reached capacity but have left it open for today. If you are not registered you won’t be able to join as Google security is very strict and will require you to be on a list.

Day 1: Pollution Party!

9:00am – 10:00am Registration
10:00am – 10:15am Introduction to OpenDataCamp
Team DataMeet
10:15am – 10.55am Karnataka State Pollution Control Board
By Dr Nagappa, Scientific Officer
11:00am – 11:10am Tea Break
11:15am – 12.00PM Environmental Support Group
12:00pm – 01.00PM Water Dr. Priyanka Jamwal
Environmental Researcher who currently is a fellow in ATREE. Her work focuses on identification of contaminant sources in surface water bodies, modeling the fate and transport of contaminants in urban hydrological systems and assessing the risk to human health due to exposure to contaminants.
01:00PM – 02.00PM Lunch
02:00PM – 03.00PM Pollution Data Collection Demos
Sensors without Borders, IndiaSpend*, Hindustan Times, YUKTIX – Open Weather Network Bangalore, India Open Data Association
03:00PM – 03.15PM Tea Break
03:15PM – 03:45PM Getting to 12 PM 2.5 | Setting the context for Action!
Sensing Local is a Bengaluru based do-tank focused towards making cities healthier, safer and more inclusive. The studio is working in partnership with Anti Pollution Drive (APD) Foundation, Mangalore towards a collaborative project on tackling air pollution. (https://sensinglocal.wordpress.com/
03:45PM – 04:45PM Urban Emissions
By Sarath Guttikunda
04:45PM – 05.30PM Group conversation and planning session on response to Geospatial Information Regulation Bill 2016
By Volunteers of SaveTheMap.in
05:30PM – 06.00PM Closing Remarks and Plans for Day 2

Pollution DEMO HAPPY HOUR!

Mapbox Happy Hour, 6p to 9pm. Puma Social Club, 100ft Road, Indiranagar. Bring your badges!

Day 2: Action Party!

“Hardware Hello World” for children.

A video posted by Thejesh GN ತೇಜೇಶ್ ಜಿ ಎನ್ (@thejeshgn) on

Sign your kid up to learn how to build environment sensors.

Sensor workshop poster

It is also a free day for people to demo, share and work on any projects they want!

Huge thank you to our sponsors!

Sponsors

http://juxt-smartmandate.com/project/india-open-data-association/

12 DAYS TIL 2016 Bangalore Open Data Camp: Pollution Party!

DataMeet will be hosting the 5th Bangalore Open Data Camp: Pollution Party on May 14th and 15th.  This year we want to spend time and look at the growing problem of pollution by spending two days examining the role of data. Last year saw a major turning point in the debate around pollution. Indian cities became a major focal point, as proof that New Delhi has worse air quality than reigning champion Beijing was proven with data. This put a spotlight on air pollution problem across India. At the same time water pollution from industry has also come up in the foaming lakes and rap videos fighting for recognition of pollution and its effects on people. The economic and development growth has meant that the building industry has been in over drive bringing sand and dust into urban and peri urban areas in large quantities plus the growing lack of proper trash disposal has had major health implications for people from all social economic backgrounds.

However, the actual exposure of pathogens and pollution is not well known, extensive data has not been made available or is being collected in a way that can’t be easily understood or acted upon. This has spurred the rise of data collection networks and agencies to fill this gap. In every major city citizen supported cheap sensor devices have been put around cities to add data to the small number of official government monitoring stations.

This year at Open Data Camp we want to explore the role of these data collection network in a growing citizen and private sector monitoring role. What is the role of open data? When these networks grow can there be agreement on standards and formats to be maintained? and Are there financially sustainable solutions that can be built on open data?

Notably Karnataka State Pollution Control Board is attending to give the keynote in the morning and hopefully bring some data with them for us.

Tentative Agenda

1) Karnataka Pollution Control Board

2) Environmental Groups to give the general ecosystem around enforcement

3) Data collection networks
Sensors without Borders
IndiaSpend*
Hindustan Times*
YUKTIX – Open Weather Network Bangalore
India Open Data Association

4) Water Pollution
Ground water
Urban lakes

5) What you can do with robust data?
Urban planning
Transport
Modeling for enforcement.

6) Open Environmental Formats and Information Discussion

Day 2

We will be hosting a sensor workshop for kids http://odc.datameet.org/sensor_workshop

Sensor workshop poster

We’d like to thank our sponsors Google, Sensor without Boards, India Open Data Association, Oorvani Foundation, and partner Reap Benefit. If you would like to sponsor or get involved please contact me @ Nisha (at) Datameet.org

2nd Open Data Camp Delhi!

Last Su23024327289_8965388572_znday DataMeet Delhi hosted their 2nd Open Data Camp!  60 people decided to spend their Sunday with us to discuss Digital India and find ways to make this programme more Open and Transparent.

The Delhi chapter decided to examine the role of openness in Digital India, especially how the open data agenda should be integrated into the initiative.  Digital India is the flagship programme of the Government of India to harness the possibilities of information technologies for accountable governance, effective citizenship, and a productive and job-creating digital economy.

This event also explored the recent international push towards better global availability of interoperable 22569224613_8e3f363c28_zand comparable data, such as the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development initiative of UN and the International Open Data Charter introduced by the Open Data Working Group of Open Government Partnership.  The discussion looked at these wider conversation in the keynote and the morning panels.

 

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Keynote: Honourable MP from Sikkim P.D. Rai.

The MP from Sikkim started off the day by talking about his experience setting up the first state level Open Data Policy, Sikkim Open Data Acquisisiton and Accessibility Policy (SODAAP),, and why it was important for them to take control of the state’s data through openness.

He stated the the “lack of reliable, structured, and proactively available data is a key barrier to good governance.”  So the SODAAP would allow state legislators to get access to data as they need it instead of having to go through the current structure of asking the Centre for data.  “Why is it that we have fancy phones but we can’t get data on public policy & schemes on it for good decisions.”

When asked how to get government to change he stated, “I’m not the executive, I’m a lawmaker. I don’t represent the government.  I question it as much as you do.”

 

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Open Data and Digital Governance

Anoop Aravind, Konatham Dileep, and Nikhil Pahwa

 

This panel focused on the Digital India from a government and journalistic point of view of Digital India.  The panel had a representative from Telegana, KPMG who is implementing E-Panchayats, and from Media Namma.

Dileep the Digital Media Director for Telegana pointed out that the government is the biggest creator of data but they are not set up to share, and are not encouraged to.  Anoop from e-Panchayats pointed out that there are technical issues with implementation and technology infiltration at the local level.  He said the biggest problem for them is the lack of mapping data that can used to help with planning.

Nikhil from Media Namma made the point that the government should proactively disclose data, “why do we need to get personal relations to get the data?” but this doesn’t replace people’s right to ask for information and not just rely on information provided by open data. Right to Information is still vital and this includes an expanded effort to protect people’s privacy.

When asked what are the challenges of openness for Digital India? That despite the big fanfare there is uneven implementation and issues that have to be solved before the dreams of Digital India are realized, and that people have to work with the government to show them the reason to be open.

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Open Data and Digital Citizenship 

Bhanupriya Rao, Dr. Biplav Srivastava, Nic Dawes, and Shashank Srinivasan

Bhanupriya Rao an RTI activist described out RTI has a pro-active disclosure requirement, however, it is not in practice and without that RTI is the best tool for now.  There is no right to data concept.

Nic Dawes described journalism as a constitutional mandate and went on say that that open data and journalism communities must work together more.  Journalists can deal with biases, data interpretation issues, graphic presentations, and tell compelling stories using tech and design.

Biplav Srivastava spoke about the need to move toward smart data consumption, for policy decisions and  individual decisions. That the next steps are data integration/re-use/standards, and linked data for analytics.

Shashank Srinivasan shared his experience with open data for conservation (WWF), how they consume OSM data for needs of protecting wildlife. What are risks for crowdsourcing for wildlife conservation?  Open data can be a problem for conservation, control over the end user is needed.

Questions to consider:

How can open data improve our work? How can academia and open data converge? Can donors influence on releasing data? What does it mean to be a digital citizen?

Lightning talks

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Guneet from Akvo shared their smart phone app that detects Fluoride levels in water.

 

 

23272573835_0385565697_zManing from  HotOSM shared their work around the world providing maps during natural disasters, including the Nepal Earthquake.

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Transport Working Group shared the work looking at bus data in Delhi.

 

 

 

 

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Bihar Gender Watch shared the work of looking at the gender split in elected bodies.

 

 

 

 

 

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NewsPie is an online news site, they shared the data work they have done in roads and around net neutrality.

 

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Aditya Dipankar shared his work designing information.

 

 

 

 

 

 

23096714180_58a2a19d0b_zAruna from MapBox shared their work mapping road naming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Turam shared his project that built more data collection tools on the Open Data Kit.

 

 

 

 

 

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Yogesh from Random Hacks of Kindness  (RHOK) on his vision for an open revolution! Also the work of RHOK in India bridging gaps between organizations on the ground and technologists.

 

 

 

23392480785_b93d014558_zMonish Khetrimayum a PHD student spoke about big data, governance and citizenship.

 

 

 

 

 

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Rakesh from Factly describes how they use RTI information and open data to make sense of information for journalists and citizens.

 

 

 

 

Group Activity: Response to Digital India

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Groups were formed to discuss each pillar and come up with questions.

We have gathered all the questions and put them in the DataMeet hackpad, you can find each pillar here.

Please feel free to take a look and add more questions and dataset requests.

After a week’s time we will be gathering everything and writing a letter of request for openness to Digital India and the various departments, DIETY, to ask them to make this information available.

It was a fantastic day! DataMeet Delhi did an amazing job putting together really interesting speakers to make this a well rounded interactive event.

Thank you especially to the sponsors for helping make this event great!

  • SARAI for the space
  • AKVO for travel
  • ICFJ for food and other support.
  • RHOK for travel

OpenDataCamp Delhi 2014 in Tweets


Filter coffee at #odcdel14


Parliamentary Constituency maps of India

One of the most often requested data on DataMeet email list is PC boundary maps of India. Election commission of India has it, but part of it is old and also is in PDF format. In the recent ODCBLR hackathon coming up with PC boundary maps was one of the biggest hackathon tasks. A group of talented hackers worked on it. Just after the hackathon Sajjad released it on our email list. Its available on GitHub in the form of shape file.

Repository: https://github.com/datameet/maps
Download: https://github.com/datameet/maps/archive/master.zip

You can contribute to the project by verifying it, correcting it if required. It’s generally good idea to fork the repository and send the pull request. You can also download the files directly if you are not interested in repository.

The shape files are very detailed and hence very huge (~30MB). It’s a great source if you are importing into PostGIS to do any kind of processing. If you are looking for online usage, then try to simplify it before using.

[ODCBLR2014] Address by TS Krishnamurthy

At this years Open Data Camp Bangalore Mr. T. S. Krishnamurthy addressed the audience.

From Wikipedia:

Taruvai Subayya Krishnamurthy (born 1941) was the Chief Election Commissioner (C.E.C) of India (February 2004 – May 2005).[1] His main assignment as C.E.C was to oversee the 2004 elections to the Lok Sabha. He was known for his integrity and a polite yet firm fist with which he handled all sensitive assignments throughout his career.He had earlier served in the Election Commission of India as a commissioner since January 2000.