All posts by Thejesh GN

Events

IIMB Policy Hackathon, 2014

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Looks like a great event for thos who are interested in Open Data and civic hacking.

Thej

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Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore invites you to the third edition of the IIMB Policy Hackathon on the 9th and 10th of August, 2014. IIMB Policy Hackathon seeks to use analysis and coding skills amongst the larger public to generate ideas and tools for better governance and to develop more relevant public policy. It provides an exciting opportunity to contribute to innovative solutions to public policy challenges and even win a prize for it.

We have two parallel hacking events this year:

The Policy Hack is a team event focused on developing data based policy responses to a policy issue. Participants are given access to a nationally representative dataset (e.g. Census of India, National Sample Survey Data, District Level Health Surveys, etc.) and have 24 hours to identify a policy challenge and develop a data-based solution to it. Participants are required to analyze, code, and offer data based solutions to policy challenges in a 5 page document.

The App for Governance is also a team event where we look at developing technology tools (web portals, mobile apps, and in general, software solutions) that seeks to leverage information from ordinary users that is crowd-sources to strengthen governance and public service delivery. Participants will be given a problem statement that poses a significant governance challenge at the start of the App Hack and will be expected to develop, in 24 hours, a technology-based solution to address it.

Timeline:

2-2:30 pm, 9th August 2014 : Team Registration
3:00 pm, 9th August 2014 : Teams begin Hacking
3:00 pm, 10th August 2014 : Teams submit their work
2:30 pm, 12th August 2014 : Top teams present their work
12.00 pm, 13th August 2014 : Winners Announcement & Prize Distribution

Registration:

Participants may register in teams of 3-4, or register as a solo participant and join a team at the venue on 9th August. There is also the option to pre-register by writing to cppconference@iimb.ernet.in. There is no fee for registration.

Prizes for each event:

Winner: Rs. 40,000
First Runners Up: Rs. 20,000
Second Runners Up: Rs. 10,000
Shortlisted teams will be invited to present at the conference.

The event starts on 9th afternoon at 2:00 pm and ends on 10th August 2014. Please spread the word in your networks and join us on Facebook.[1] If you are interested in participating, please pre-register via email with the following details:

Team Name:

# of Team Members:
Contact Name:
Contact #:

For more information, please write to cppconference@iimb.ernet.in. Looking forward to your participation in the event.

CPP Hackathon Organizing Team

Sridhar Pabbisetty (Namma Bengaluru Foundation)
Arnab Mukherji (IIM Bangalore)
Grant Miller (Stanford University)
CPP Conference | Find Us on Facebook

Open Data India Watch

Open Data India Watch – 4

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Stories

Events

Opportunities

  • GDN NEXT HORIZONS ESSAY CONTEST 2014 by Gates Foundation.

    Data and information technology: There is growing excitement about the power of open data as a tool both to inform policy and spending decisions and to hold governments to account for commitments they make. What will this data and technology driven transformation in the development project “marketplace” actually look like?? How might citizens use data to provide feedback on government services and development projects? What will it take to get there?

Bangalore, DataMeet-Up

DataMeetUp – Bangalore – July/2014

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Its been quite sometime that we had a physical meetup in Bangalore. We are planning to host one this month end, i.e on Thursday, July 31, from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM. Like all our previous monthly meetups, we have a rough plan

Main Talk: Large Scale Telephonic Polls for Real Time Data Collection
Thejesh GN will share his experiences about conducting large scale telephonic polls for real time data collections.
This could be employed for
– Exit poll conducting
– Real time sentiment gathering during the events like Budget
He will share his experiences, learnings and tips.

Group updates – DataMeet group updates and discussions related to future plans.

If you like to show your data project or talk about it. Let us know we will add it to the schedule.

Please do RSVP on our Meetup group. It helps us in planning the event.

http://www.meetup.com/DataMeet/events/195229042/

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Open Data India Watch

OPEN DATA INDIA WATCH – 3

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Stories

  • Census of India – Digital Library has published all the state boundaries. They are in PDF format.
  • >API for getting Current daily price of various commodities from various markets (Mandis). The data refers to prices of various commodities. It has the wholesale maximum price, minimum price and modal price on daily basis. This dataset is generated through the AGMARKNET Portal (http://agmarknet.nic.in), which disseminates daily market information of various commodities.
  • Economictimes has budget distribution visualizations
  • How does markets react to Budget by Gramener. Every year, on the day of the budget, the share market shows considerable movement. For example, in 2007, every sector fell with the exception of Tobacco. The same happened in 2009 as well. But in 2010, every sector except Tobacco rose.Similarly, almost every banking stock fell in 2012 with the notable exception of HDFC, whereas in 2010, almost every banking stock rose. Tobacco (which is dominated by ITC) has grown on every budget day since 2004, except in 2010 and 2013. On the other hand, Media & Entertainment has shrunk in every budget, except in 2011 and 2012.
  • Poor Sanitation in India May Afflict Well-Fed Children With Malnutrition This research has quietly swept through many of the world’s nutrition and donor organizations in part because it resolves a great mystery: Why are Indian children so much more malnourished than their poorer counterparts in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Visualizations: CRIME HOTSPOTS IN INDIA – Crimes Against Women
  • Pykih produced India Budget 2014 Viz. for FirstPost.com. The major challenge of this project was that we had to fetch data from Twitter and National Stock Exchange, clean it, analyse, model it and push it to CDN live, minute after minute in an extremely robust fashion.

Tools/Learning

  • Odyssey.js is an open-source tool that allows you to combine maps, narratives, and other multimedia into a beautiful story.
  • Coursera has new course:- Metadata: Organizing and Discovering Information: Metadata is an unsung hero of the modern world, the plumbing that makes the information age possible. This course describes how Metadata is used as an information tool for the Web, for databases, and for the software and computing applications around us.
  • Mapping Digital Media: India – Report. The Mapping Digital Media project examines the global opportunities and risks created by the transition from traditional to digital media. Covering 60 countries, the project examines how these changes affect the core democratic service that any media system should provide: news about political, economic, and social affairs.

Projects

  • People are denied access to research hidden behind paywalls every day. This problem is invisible, but it slows innovation, kills curiosity and harms patients. This is an indictment of the current system. Open Access has given us the solution to this problem by allowing everyone to read and re-use research. We created the Open Access Button to track the impact of paywalls and help you get access to the research you need. By using the button you’ll help show the impact of this problem, drive awareness of the issue, and help change the system. Furthermore, the Open Access Button has several ways of helping you get access to the research you need right now.
Uncategorized

The Fifth Elephant 2014 is here

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HasGeek has been a great contributor to DataMeet/ODC community. They are running Fifth Elephant for a while now. I have been to couple of them and they are great. Zainab Bawa the lead organizer of Fifth Elephant 2014, sent us a note about the event and why its a great event for our community.

Thej

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Facebook has 100 million users in India. You know who has a billion?
The Indian Census.

Varsha Joshi, Director of the National Population Register, was present at The Fifth Elephant 2013 to explain on how the census team collects and processes such a vast amount of data.

Each year, The Fifth Elephant conference brings consumers and producers of technology to understand how data is processed (via available technologies), insights mined from datasets in different domains, and opportunities that data presents for economy and society. The key differentiator of The Fifth Elephant conference is that the content is crowdsourced and carefully curated by a panel of experts.

HasGeek, organizer of The Fifth Elephant, also shares a strong commitment to open access, open knowledge and open data. We ensure that every edition of The Fifth Elephant has representatives from the government –– either officials themselves or technology teams working on important data projects –– addressing citizens’ concerns around privacy and protection of data.
In 2012, we had Pramod Varma and Regunath B. speaking about the Aadhar project alongside Lucy Chambers’ presentation on the OKF’s work with data journalism, Nikhil Pahwa’s on RTI and Sumandro’s on NSSO data.

In 2013, Varsha Joshi talked to participants about the challenges that the census faces in collating data.
This year, we have invited Mr. Ram Sewak Sharma, secretary of Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY), to talk about the state of government data and how citizens can participate in strengthening government’s efforts.

Why should datameet members attend The Fifth Elephant?
The Fifth Elephant is a relevant event for datameet members not just from the immediate standpoint of open data. This year’s edition also brings talks from finance and healthcare where speakers will talk about the challenges of working with complex financial datasets, data security and privacy concerns in the field of genomics, and related concerns. S. Anand will speak about what it took – in terms of technology infrastructure and data visualization – to do real-time visualizations for the recently concluded Indian elections. Participants will also get a flavour of frameworks – Lambda, Julia, OSM – and how these are used for building tools and platforms for mining data.

We welcome you to participate in the discussions and enrich interactions at the conference.

Schedule: https://fifthelephant.in/2014/conference
Registrations: http://fifthelephant.doattend.com
For more information, write to support@hasgeek.com

Open Data India Watch

OPEN DATA INDIA WATCH – 2

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Stories

  • Hindu has a timeline of Indian Financial Ministers as part of budget article. Its been done using KnightLab’s timeline framework. Here is the direct link and source of the published Google Doc used for generating.
  • Controlled Vocabulary Services by Government of India. Useful if you want to standardize names in your project.
  • Devdatta Tengse presents SouthSideUp – Maps to Show A web mercator map with south Up and North at the Bottom.
  • Stories from a Database | Despair and Hope At Chhota Gubbara, which caters to tiny newborns, we had 101 babies. 55 were boys. 46 were girls. Not bad! Especially considering that the sex ratio at birth in Uttarakhand is an alarming 886 girls to 1000 boys, our figures seem to indicate that parents are almost as likely to seek help for their newborn girls as for their newborn boys. Statistically, in fact, the difference was insignificant.
  • Accessing Open Data Portal (India) using APIs by R-Bloggers – Most of the data-sets on the portal are available for manual download. Some of the data-sets though are also available to be accessed using APIs. In this post, I’ll go over how to access that data using APIs (specifically JSON API) in R.Again, the variety of R packages available makes this a not so difficult task. I’ve made use of mainly these packages – XML, RCurl, RJSONIO, plyr.
  • A look at how income affects consumption habits By Rukmini S and Sriram Sivaraman. Last week, the National Sample Survey Office, India’s official source of regular large-sample survey statistics on consumption, employment and other core socio-economic issues, put out its 558th report. The report is based on a nationally representative sample of over 1 lakh households in every state and UT, and measures the levels of consumption of various goods and services. As we’ve noted in the paper, the data points to a big revival in the functioning of India’s Public Distribution System. We also looked at how income circumscribes India’s food choices. That second story is the one we wanted to look at a little more closely today.
  • National Natural Resources Management System (NNRMS) has defined standards for GeoSpatial Data for India and its called NNRMS STANDARDS – A National Standard For EO Images, Thematic & Cartographic Maps, GIS Databases And Spatial Outputs (PDF).
  • Here’s why Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, UP roads are death traps By Rukmini S and Sriram Sivaraman. The National Crime Records Bureau – India’s official source of police statistics – released its numbers for the last year earlier this week. One major part of the findings are, of course the crime statistics, particularly to do with crimes against women. But another fascinating part is what the police terms as ‘accidental deaths’, a catch-all phrase that covers everything from being bitten by a dog to a bomb explosion and suicides.
  • Data.Gov.In has a new visualization Engine to explore and visualize data. You can also add your data to enhance the visualization.

Data

  • Young Lives: School Survey, India, 2010-2011 – A school survey was introduced into Young Lives in 2010, following the third round of the household survey, in order to capture detailed information about children’s experiences of schooling. It addressed two main research questions:1. how do the relationships between poverty and child development manifest themselves and impact upon children’s educational experiences and outcomes? 2. to what extent does children’s experience of school reinforce or compensate for disadvantage in terms of child development and poverty?

World

  • No open data? No problem. 5 ways entrepreneurs are fueling open data in the developing world – On the entrepreneurial side, the World Bank’s Open Finances team has been exploring the commercial value of open data, and looking for opportunities to support entrepreneurs. These goals are achievable thanks to governments who have fostered innovation around public data by taking the step to open it. What happens when governments haven’t yet opened public data? Is it possible for entrepreneurs to take advantage of open data where it does not exist?
  • Alberto Cairo: Data journalism needs to up its own standards– The data visualization expert argues that FiveThirtyEight and Vox have overpromised and underdelivered — and that they need to treat their data with more scientific rigor.
Open Data India Watch

Open Data India Watch – 1

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Stories

Mapping Access to Toilets between Social Groups | Data Stories
The map below reflects that difference in access across districts. For each district, I calculated the percentage of dalit/tribal households with access to a toilet at home. I did the same calculation for households which were neither dalit nor tribal, as classified by the census. By dividing the two, we get a measure of how disparate the access is. For instance, in the district of Budaun, where the crime occurred, 15% of dalit homes according to the 2011 census, had access to a toilet at home, compared with 35% of non-dalit or non-tribal homes. This gives me a disparity measure of about 0.43 (15% divided by 35%). And so on for each district.

Why Punjab still holds aloft the flag of ‘new politics’
While the entire country appeared unimpressed by the Aam Aadmi Party and its promises, Punjab not only sent four of its candidates to the Lok Sabha, but as recent data shows, also overcame the rural-urban divide in its mandate for the party. Srinivasan Ramani explores why.

El Nino may cause weak monsoon & high prices; poses serious challenge to Modi government
As the chart on the next page (El Nino and the Indian Monsoon…) shows, strong El Nino conditions (the shaded region to the right) usually occur along with a weak monsoon. But note that there have been cases, most notably in 1997, when a very strong El Nino was accompanied by a normal monsoon.

Here’s What a Polarized Vote Looks Like
The chart below shows what that change means in a visual sense. It looks at the vote share of the biggest party in each of the 1500 or so polling stations in the constituency, and then plots those values according to how often they occur. So for instance, there were a relatively few polling stations where the largest party got 40% of the vote or below. There were many more with 60% or more of the vote in a booth. And so on. The number of polling stations where the largest party received any given vote share (from 0 to 1), can be read off the y-axis.

Average Daily Wage Rate in Rural India is up on data.gov.in for you to explore.

GoeBlr meet up in Bangalore

Other Good Reads

Visualizing Algorithms : Algorithms are a fascinating use case for visualization. To visualize an algorithm, we don’t merely fit data to a chart; there is no primary dataset. Instead there are logical rules that describe behavior. This may be why algorithm visualizations are so unusual, as designers experiment with novel forms to better communicate. This is reason enough to study them.

Email Gold, OpenDataCamp

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.

News

Letter to NIC for a data portal to host public contributed datasets

Sumandro drafted a letter to be sent to NIC regarding the possibility of a data portal to host public contributed datasets, that is datasets originating from both governmental and non-governmental sources, but contributed only by non-governmental agencies and individuals.

We sent that letter to NIC this week. Below is the copy of it.

Letter to NIC for a data portal for public contributed datasets