NPR has a new tool that generates a story from your spreadsheets called CopyText.py. See the NPR post and video here.
Take it for a spin and let us know what you think of it.
Indian Shapefile Central
With the upcoming GeoBlr next week I thought it was a good moment for you all to take a look and help us build up our GIS data directory.
https://datameet.org/wiki/indiangeospatialdata
The most common question on the list is how to get access to geo spatial data. So we decided to start putting up some resources online. Which, will also include background, policy information, and other resources for people interested in learning more or using geo spatial data.
Please contribute sources you like to use. Or feel free to ask questions about geo spatial data on the list or request a session to learn some hands on skills.
Also if you are in Bangalore please sign up to attend GeoBlr at CIS on June 5th.
DataMeet Story: S Anand
DataMeet was started on January 26th 2011 by a handful of data enthusiasts. One of them was Anand S, also a Trustee of DataMeet Trust, he is currently one of the founders of Gramener.
In 2011, Anand was working at Infosys in London. He and a few friends, that he had gone to school with or worked with, were talking about starting a group where people can share tips for working with data. “The intent was always to work on data in India and to find others doing the same. Since there were many data groups in London I felt there should be one for India.”
The first few members were Thej, Naveen, Bala and Manu, they were all working with data in some capacity either professional or personal. Naveen had just started Gramener a data analytics firm, Bala and Manu had started Report Bee, on data analysis for education, Thej was working at Janaagraha and Infosys on data projects. They all shared a passion for sharing and open data, and other open source technologies.
They called it DataMeet because “it was available” then invited people they knew to join the list and had Skype calls about sharing data science tips. You can see the minutes from the first meeting here: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1LXm5OwQiS4xzbcqfTrF6rBzZ76aGrwvKFYD36RPYS2c And a video was taken of Anand S showing people an Excel tip.
Anand adds that he never expected it to reach beyond 100 and that the group is of great value to him because of all the data and ideas that are being shared. When asked what he thinks DataMeet will do in the future he hopes the group doesn’t change too much and that “everyone continues adding their own knowledge and working toward opening up and sharing data.” Anything else? Anand doesn’t want to speculate. “We’ll see!”
Presenting the DataMeet Official Logo!
DataMeet needed a logo so we asked the group if they could provide some ideas. We thought we would get 1 or 2 ideas but we ended up with 15 great design ideas!
Not knowing how to pick we decided to ask the group to vote. You can see all the potential designs here. The voting ended on May 20th and after a few tweaks to the design. The winner is:
and a short icon here:
Thank you to Sumandro for designing this amazing logo for us!
Credit the following icon from the Noun Project as part of the logo. You can get the files here.
Thank you to everyone who contributed designs and to all who voted!
Bangalore Upcoming Events
Data related events coming up.
May, June, July
May 23rd
National elections 2014: how technology powered campaigns
Bangalore
May 27th to June 19th.
Certificate in Data Journalism from Takshashila
Online Course
July 23rd to 26th
Fifth Elephant HasGeek
Bangalore
Great Election Coverage By EPW
Srinivasan Ramani did some great work on the elections over at EPW!
Check out their work and you can see the data he used here.
Discussion: Vote List Security
What are the issues around voter privacy?
What should the Election Commission be considering?
Join the discussion here.
Or add your thoughts in the comments.
Election Day Visuals
A few election day result visualizations.
Here a few good sites for looking at the results. Add more in the comments.
NIC/ECI
Mention on Hindu Data Blog!
Thanks to Rukmini from the Hindu Data Blog!
One bright spark in all this gloom has been India’s growing Open Data community. Srinivas Ramani, Senior Assistant Editor at the Economic and Political Weekly, put out this fantastic compilation of constituency-wise turnout figures, also neatly visualised as an India map, on Twitter yesterday (he is@vrsrini). Srinivas says that many state CEOs were helpful, but he also benefitted from the generosity of journalists like Anil Padmanabhan, Deputy Managing Editor at Mint (@capitalcalculus) and the open data community on a Google Group called Datameet which helped him create shape files to fit the numbers to the map. Lastly, Srinivas, like other members of the community put the results of their hard work into the public domain for others to play with, without getting proprietary and possessive about it, something that I as a journalist have still to fully learn.
Read the rest over at The Hindu Blog here.
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.