Ever since we started publishing Indian village boundaries in GeoJSON format, the single most question asked was how to convert geojson into Shapefile. To answer that question I created a screencast. Here it is.
The tool used is called MapShaper.
Yearly Archives: 2016
Field Papers: How To
At the Indiranagar Data Party! Garbage Go! they had a few people who didn’t want to use technology to map garbage so Maanya and Aarthy printed out Field Papers for mapping. These worked really well and allowed for a more inclusive event.
Maanya from Mapbox made a how to for using Field Papers.
Step 1: Click on Make
Step 2: Go to the area you want to map and select with the rectangle.
Step 3: Download and print.
They will look like this and you can give them to people to map along the way.
Data Party! Garbage Go! Update
After a week of mapping 1000 spots in Bangalore has been mapped!
We have 50 people who have mapped at least one spot across the city. The event last Saturday brought together people from different neighborhoods to take a walk and map some garbage.
We hope to be able to double this number and maybe even get to 3000 spots by the 3rd week of October!
If you have some time please download the app and map the garbage spots in your area. You can see the full map and zoom into your neighborhood here.
To download the app find the links below.
Link to Mapunity Groups IOS app:
Link to Mapunity Groups Android app.
See Read more
If you don’t want to download the app feel free to send us pictures. Turn on the GPS tag on your camera and then put up your pic on Twitter or Facebook with the Hashtag #garbagego
All data will be made open at the end of the campaign.
RTI Stories: Repost Citizen Matters
Troubles in getting data through RTI.
It has been precisely five months since I filed an RTI application with the Advertisement department of Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) seeking information about legal and illegal advertisement hoardings in the city. (If you haven’t read the first piece you can read it here). And today as I write this second post about the status of my application, I stand in dismay, even as I continue to struggle to get the information that I am looking for.
In the last five months as I ran around pursuing this RTI application, there have been times when I sat counting the days and hours I spent on this chase. I would ask myself, “is it all worth it? What am I going to get at the end of it?” May be after months of prolonged wait, even if I succeed to get the information, it might just turn out to be obsolete. But then if I stop following it up, I for sure know, the lethargic city corporation officers who shifted their responsibility and did their best to wash their hands off, will continue doing the same in future. –
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Data Party! Garbage Go!
At DataMeet we have spent years looking for and trying to make data accessible. The last few years more and more data is being made public which we are excited about however people demand data that fills the gaps in data that already exists or that is more actionable. Data that people want and need isn’t being produced, and if it is being produced it isn’t being shared.
This is the most true in urban spaces where there are tons of projects dedicated to collecting data for the city but none of this data enters the public domain as open data. It isn’t public data because the government doesn’t collect it and the various governance and civic oriented groups who collect the data are more prone to write reports or put the analyzed data up online and not the usable and complete raw data.
So DataMeet along with Oorvani Foundation and Mapunity want to start a monthly Data Party! Where we pick a topic and try to collect as much data as we can over a month. Then we will make the data open for download on OpenCity Urban data portal and also send it to the appropriate person in the government, as well as, write data stories on Citizen Matters.
So please join us on Sept 24th to kick off the first ever Data Party! Garbage Go!
There are an estimated 9000 garbage blackspots in Bengaluru. We are trying to catch them all!
Sign up to map your neighborhood everyday. Or join us for chai and snacks on Sept 24th and map with friends in 3 locations: Koramangala, Indiranagar or Frazertown.
You have to register and download the app so we can plan for the snacks.
Event location will be sent to you once you register.
Time is 9:30am to 12:30am – Sept 24th Saturday morning.
9:30am – Intro and app explanation
10 to 12 – Mapping
12 to 12:30 – Closing and Next Steps.
All data collected will be made open on the OpenCity.in Urban Data Portal for download and use, and this data will be sent to the BBMP and followed up on.
Indirangar – Maanya – Meeting place MapBox India
Koramangala – Nitin – Meeting place Sagar Fast Foods behind BDA complex
Frazertown – Contact Nisha Thompson – Meeting place French Loaf by Richards Park.
Download the app and get mapping.
Link to Mapunity Groups IOS app:
Link to Mapunity Groups Android app.
SeeRead more
Data Policies in Telangana
Government of Telangana has launched four IT policies related to data on cybersecurity, data centers, data analytics and open data. Honorable IT Minister K T Rama Rao has announced the intention of separate sectoral policies through the launch of Telangana IT policy in the month of April’16. During the launch he stressed the importance of open data policy for the state. In his own words:
” Telangana will be among the pioneers in the country in coming up with this open data policy. The open data policy is the first step in opening up government data to a host of potential applications. The policy sets the necessary framework in place to operationalize the state open data portal. The policy has many enabling provisions in place for multiple stakeholders. Through this policy we hope to catalyze data and to make data driven decision making possible and development of important solutions for societal benefits. “
These policies were made after several consultations with industry, academia, civil society and various individual experts. Though the policies focus on individual sectors primarily, most of the elements are inter-linked with the common element of data. While the state government intends to foster its economy and business with the help of data, the open data policy focuses on enabling transparency and human development apart from economic development. Telangana, an IT rich state following open data practices will be a major boost for the ecosystem in India too.
We have been interacting with officials from Government of Telangana since December ’15, providing appropriate suggestions for the open data policy. Dileep Konatham, Director for Digital Media, Department of Information Technology was our esteemed panelist during discussions on Digital India at Open Data Camp Delhi ’15. Datameet will work with the Government of Telangana to help implement the policy with necessary suggestions for guidelines and community building over the coming months.
Links to the policies launched:
Ask Us Anything – Updated
It has been 5 years and we are now at over 1500 members and we thought it would be a good time to do an Ask Us Anything Hangout with DataMeet Central – Thej, Anand S, and me.
It will be Tuesday September 20th, at 6:30pm. We will be doing a broadcast Google Hangout will send the link out half hour before. Bring your thoughts and questions about DataMeet, data in India, things we have done, things we should do, etc. It would be helpful to have some questions beforehand so feel free to comment here, if not you can ask during the hangout!
Hope to see you then!
Updated!
Thanks to everyone who joined the hangout! Here’s the video.
Save the Map – Update
From Sajjad
Thank you so much for supporting Save the Map ()
and sending your thoughts to the Ministry of Home Affairs regarding the Geospatial Information Regulation Bill. We manage to send over1700 emails to the MHA, and several organisations and groups sent feedback to them expressing disapproval of the current state of the bill.As of the monsoon session the bill was not submitted to Parliament and seems to have been put on the back burner. There has been no official response regarding if they will change the draft and incorporate any of the feedback. So as of right now we are unsure if the bill will come back and what form it will take.
We will be continuing to monitor the situation and send updates when there are new developments. You can see some other responses/comments that have been sent to the MHA [1].
Again thank you for your support and quick action. We hope to continue working toward a good policy on geospatial information that supports individuals and businesses to continue to innovate in the space.
Cheers,
Sajjad for Save the Map team
[1]
* DataMeet – http://datameet.org/2016/06/
* FICCI – http://blog.ficci.com/
* Digital Empowerment Foundation –
http://internetrights.in/wp-
Comments-on-Draft-Geospatial-
* Center for Internet and Society –
http://cis-india.org/internet-
* Medianama – http://www.medianama.com/2016/
* Internet Freedom Foundation –
https://drive.google.com/file/
Happy Independence Day and Open Indian Village Boundaries
One of the longest and most passionately discussed subject on the Data{Meet} list is the availability of Indian Village Boundaries in Digital format. Search for Indian Village shape files and you can spend hours on reading interesting conversations.
Over last two years different members of community have tried to digitize the maps available through various government platforms or shared the maps through their organizations.
A look at the list discussion tells you that boundaries of at the least 75% of the states are available in various formats and quality. What we need at this point is a consolidate effort to bring them all on par in format, attributes and to some level quality. So some volunteers at Data{Meet} agreed to come together, clean up the available maps, add attributes, make them geojson and publish them on our GitHub repository called Indian Village Boundaries.
Of course this will be an on going effort but we would love to reach a baseline (all states) by year end. As of now I have cleaned up and uploaded Gujarat. I have at the least 4 more states to go live by month end. Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Goa. I will announce them on the list as they go live.
The boundaries are organized by state using state ISO code. All the village boundaries are available in geojson (WGS84, EPSG4326) format. The project page gives you the status of the data as we clean and upload. Data is not perfect yet, there could many errors both in data and boundaries. You can contribute by sending the pull requests. Please use the census names when correcting the attributes and geojson for shapes. Please source them to an official source when sending corrections.
Like everything else community creates. All map data will be available under Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL). This data is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. If you find issues we are more than happy to accept corrections but please source them to an official source.
On this 70th Independence day, as we celebrate the historic event of India becoming Free and Independent, Data{Meet} community celebrates by cleaning, formatting and digitizing our village boundaries. Have a great time using the maps and contributing back to society.
https://github.com/datameet/indian_village_boundaries
Picture: Kedarnath range behind the Kedarnath temple early morning. By Kaustabh, Available under CCBYSA.
Guide on Digitizing Static Maps
I was recently invited to Nagpur by a group called Center for Peoples Collective, to brainstorm doing for Nagpur the kind of things I’ve done in Pune for budget data processing/viz and mapping. We found that they didn’t have any digital data (ie, shapefile, kml etc) of Nagpur’s electoral wards, but they did have some high-res images released by Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) with the boundaries marked. So I walked them through a process that I’ve worked out, which uses free online services and doesn’t need any software or advanced skills to do. I’m sharing that process here.
Continue reading Guide on Digitizing Static Maps