Category Archives: City

Maps For Disaster Preparedness

July 1, 2015 Guneet Narula

Datameet, Mapbox and Akvo Foundation are organizing an OpenStreetMapping Party on 4th of July 2015 in New Delhi.

We are getting together to map a few Indian cities and villages – improving road networks and infrastructure data in OpenStreetMap – the largest living map of the world. Join us to learn how to map on OpenStreetMap.

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team activates in times of crisis to support responding organisations with map data, helping them better plan disaster response. Mappers around the world get together to improve road networks and infrastructure data in OpenStreetMap. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team leverages the OpenStreetMap platform in various directions to support crisis management with map data.

The impact we can make during a crisis is entirely dependent on the availability of map data. We will focus on understnding how maps and data can be used in the Indian context through a hands-on workshop, and integrate many of the lessons we learned first hand from the most recent earthquake that struck Nepal where over 2,000 volunteer from across the world came together to support the response efforts to quadruple road milage and add 30% more buildings in the most affect regions of Nepal.

Please visit the event page to RSVP or join the Facebook Event.

hackathon, Mumbai

Mumbai Meet 6: Data Science Hackathon

May 13, 2015 Ritvvij Parrikh

DataMeet 6 was a 2 day, Data Science Hackathon that was organised by a BFSI company, Zone Startups and DataMeet Mumbai. The Hackathon took place in the Bombay Stock Exchange Building at Zone Startup’s office. Twelve teams participated. These included teams of young data enthusiasts and specialist data scientists teams from companies like TCS and Housing.com.

The BFSI company opened up 80GB of it’s real transactional data in a secure environment to the participating data enthusiasts.

The teams were expected to analyze the data and draw out insights that would be relevant to their use case scenarios such as Health Bankruptcy or pull out a trend which is hidden and unknown to the BFSI company. Teams were free to use any tool of their choice from R, Python, Tableau, etc.

Each team was provided an individual secure Oracle DB connection from which they could query the data but not download the data. The Oracle DB connections were opened only to the Static IPs of Zone Startups Office and the data to and fro from the servers was monitored to ensure against downloading of the data.

Day 1

The day started with various teams analysing the raw data, tables, meaning of columns. The representatives from the BFSI company also gave a briefing about objectives.

Day 2

Many of the young teams did not turn up on Day 2 due to complexity of the problem. At the end of Day 2, the judges from the BFSI company evaluated each team’s progress, gave feedback and suggestions.

DataMeet-Up Report, Delhi

Delhi Jal Board and Open Water Data: Report from DataMeet-Up

May 10, 2015 Sumandro 1 Comment

A DataMeet-Up was held on Thursday, April 30, 2015, at the Akvo office to discuss the Summer Action Plan prepared by the Delhi Jal Board (DJB) and the data concerns thereof. Sundeep Narwani of Delhi Dialogue Commission presented the Action Plan. Kapil Mishra, MLA and Vice-Chairman of DJB, participated in the discussions and described the planned activities at DJB.

Here are the minutes of the meeting, prepared by Sandeep Mertia.

Sundeep Narwani, started with a presentation on Delhi Jal Board’s Summer Action Plan (SAP) 2015. Some important point from his presentation were:

SAP is a short term measure for three months of summer
Big problem: 40% of Delhi does not have enough piped water networks, and thus tanker services and unauthorised supply exist
They have planned several measures for improving the systems of – tube wells, infrastructure (replacing old lines) and repairs, grievance redressal and sewage treatment.

The details are available in the Summer Action Plan document.

This was followed by a long discussion session on several issues and concerns – related to water problems in Delhi. Some of the important questions, comments and suggestions were:

What is the authenticity of data which DJB has?
Answer: Doubtful.
What’s the organisational structure of DJB, and its relationship with the MCD?
Answer: DJB is a state body, independent from MCD
There is no data on bulk supply to colonies
Very little end user data. Lack of meter reading and averaged bills are part of the reasons for this problem
There is no way to interconnect supply between localities
No data on quality of water
Dr. Rajinder Kaur spoke about using existing spatial data maps of NCT/NCR, and the research conducted by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute on using spatial data for classifying ground water depth and quality
Dr. Renu Khosla, from Centre for Urban and Regional Excellence spoke about using GIS data for slums
Mr. Kapil Mishra, the Vice-Chairman of the DJB spoke at length about how they plan to transform the DJB. Also, he promised all data sharing from DJB’s side.

After a general discussion on various water related issues in Delhi, in the last segment we focused on framing the data problems associated with SAP 2015.

Need to think about the water data which already exists.
Sundeep will put up a list of people and organisations which have data on water in Delhi
A suggestion was made to focus on Gram Sabha level data as well
Need to prioritize the issue of water access to all, the missing data on ‘access’ related problems and appropriate mechanisms
Some private bodies have been collecting data from GPRS meters, let’s try to open this data
Need to map the borewells
Need to interpret and understand the data which DJB requires.

To Do list

We will list out all data sets that have informed the SAP document [Time: 2 weeks]
Sundeep will share the data sets already available from DJB
Once the list of data sets is prepared by us, it will be submitted to DJB via Sundeep and Kapil, who will then see if the mentioned data sets can be opened up. [Approximate time: 1 month]
Once these data sets are available, we will evaluate the quality of these data sets
Identify data sets that are missing and the ones that require a better collection process

Resources

We are using a Google spreadsheet to list out all data sets that informed the Summer Action Plan.

We are using HackPad to collect various resources.

Images of notes takes by Namrata Mehta and Sumandro Chattapadhyay at the meeting:

Ahmedabad, Data, DataMeet-Up, Events, transport

{Ahmedabad} – 2nd Meetup

April 30, 2015 Shravan Shah

Data{Meet} Ahmedabad – 2nd Meetup

Data{Meet} Ahmedabad – 2nd Meeting

Our 2nd meetup was held at IIM-A, under the aegis of the RTE Resource Centre, with 20 participants; half of them had attended the 1st meetup.

Talk #1: All walls come down – by Ashish Ranjan, RTE Resource Centre, IIM-A

The first talk in the 2nd DataMeet of Ahmedabad Chapter brought forward the efforts being put together by the team RTE, working out of IIM-Ahmedabad. The team members present at the venue were Prof. Ankur Sarin, Ashish Ranjan, Advaita R and Nishank Varshney. Ashish presented their journey of supporting the implementation of RTE in the state of Gujarat.

The Right to Education (RTE) act Section 12 requires schools to enrol a certain number of children from economically weaker families. The RTE Resource Centre (rterc.in) organises pre-enrolment campaigns for the benefit of prospective students and their parents, and has enlisted NGOs for hand-holding the children post-enrolment. The talk gave a glimpse of their experience in Ahmedabad, observations from Maharashtra, and the data-related challenges they faced.

The management of this important activity was being done manually. This threw up many problems:
The registration of beneficiary families was often incomplete, with partial addresses – recording just the area of residence e.g. “Jamalpur”. This lead to many parents complaining about non-receipt of allotment letters..
There was no mapping of schools or beneficiary families, which could have aided better matching of children and schools.

A study by the team RTE revealed how a large number of schools were finding their way around the RTE mandate. These methods include making demands of un-required documentation of the parents to, tricking the MIS systems which enable applications from parents, into counting the ages of the children eligible for the schools as ineligible amongst various others. Nishank pitched in with instances from Maharashtra, where the minimum and maximum permissible age limits were deliberately entered by schools in such a way that potential students would be under age during an admission year, and over age the next year, effectively excluding them. In some particularly bad cases, the difference was one day: the child would have to be born on a specific date. For lack of efficient and transparent allotment processes, there were cases of candidates getting multiple admissions (as much as 18) while some did not get any. To bring out all these analyses, though, the school and student data from the Maharashtra RTE website had to be painstakingly downloaded, manually. Many DMers offered support to gather this data more easily.

The team was quite inspired by the school map of the Karnataka Learning Partnership (klp.org.in/map) and wants to build such a comprehensive tool for themselves, with features to find schools within a specified distance, and help match students with schools. Unlike the Karnataka programme, there still is no MIS in place to facilitate the enrolment and selection process. Shravan suggested that it might be possible to use the codebase of KLP and adapt it for use in Ahmedabad. Hopefully, the D{M} folks will volunteer for the necessary support.

The RTE team also wants to build a tool to track the performance of enrolled students. They discussed about the potential privacy issues involved in this. It was suggested that the performance reporting to be published on the website could be at an appropriate level of aggregation which safeguards privacy and preserves discernible performance stats. The possibility of using ODK for volunteer led data collection was also discussed.
Getting together at the meetup opened up many possibilities for collaboration from the participants as a few of them came forward with suggestions and also extended their support to this cause.

Talk #2: Public Transport of Ahmedabad

Jayesh Gohel is not your everyday architect. He dropped out of his course at CEPT because he got too interested in code and soon enough he started enjoying making websites. Being an Amdavadi, he noticed the lack of infrastructure, both digital and non-digital in supporting the commuting that AMTS enabled in the city and so he decided to work on amtsinfo.in – the unofficial official support and information website for the Ahmedabad Municipal Transport Service.

At the 2nd Datameet in Ahmedabad, Jayesh inspired the audience with his experiences with developing the website with the sole aim of solving the information problem related to the rather important and convenient network that AMTS is. Jayesh’s talk was simple and spoke about his personal motivations and learnings in the course of the development of this app. It also brought to the light the issues that plague the archaic systems that govern our modern lives, which can otherwise be so easily solved with the use of digital technology. However, ‘there’s hope if all of us take initiatives’, Jayesh said.

Bangalore, GeoBLR

Francesca Recchia on Redressing Geopolitics

April 1, 2015 Sajjad Anwar 1 Comment

Among other goals this year for GeoBLR, we want to engage conversations that drift away from technical details of making maps and working with spatial data. In March, we featured Francesca Recchia to talk about geopolitics.

Francesca is an independent researcher and writer who has worked and taught in different parts of the world, including India, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine. She is interested in the geopolitical dimension of cultural processes and in recent years has focused her research on urban transformations and creative practices in countries in conflict.

Francesca spoke about her work in Kabul over the last two years around the Little Book of Kabul – exploring cultural practices by following Kabul’s own artists. Geographical and political borders and the construction of geopolitical imaginations have a profound impact on the way people think about and define themselves. She drew stories out of Mappa Mundi and Alighiero Boetti trying to connect how they reflect the geopolitical transformations of the world.

Francesca says that the only way to understand politics and geopolitics and what this means for people in areas in conflict is to be amidst of it. This, she thinks is why one should work with artists and photographers.
Photos by Lorenzo Tugnoli

Ahmedabad, City, DataMeet-Up, Events, Uncategorized

{Ahmedabad} – First Meeting

March 13, 2015 Shravan Shah 2 Comments

Data{Meet} Ahmedabad chapter was initiated on 7th March 2015. 25 souls attended the first meeting. The venue was SAATH Charitable Trust.

The meeting started with an introduction of the organizers, and a quick round of introductions from the attendees. We had a mix of students, researchers, professionals, and entrepreneurs. The idea and importance of a community built around open data, as we at Data{Meet} represent, was described to the members. Shravan and Mahroof, co-organizers of the chapter, shared the brief history of how Data{Meet} came to be, and how Thej and Nisha were instrumental in initiating the community.

Shravan gave a lightning presentation about community mapping using OpenStreetMap and briefly explained the editing features. Apart from OSM, Shravan was also found promoting {;-)} mapbox. Aditya (the third organizer) shared a few Infographics on sanitation in India, the Indian railways, and the military capabilities of Asian countries that he created at Folo (folography.com).

The meeting itself was quite active, with people wanting to know more about how we as a community would work, what platforms we would use, privacy issues, possible data applications for Ahmedabad etc. Arun was eager to know whether OSM could be used to map customers privately. Mahroof mentioned the data initiative of the Indian government data.gov.in and how some additional work is needed to bring all the disparate data for them to be more useful to the public. There was a general agreement that lots of data is available from various sources, but not in an easily usable form. Some discussion also happened around voters ID, Adhaar, the Social Security number of USA, and the possible privacy issues. We ended up discussing various issues for about 2 hours, until we closed at 9 PM. For a first meeting of strangers, our event was a huge success with small discussions happening even after the meeting was formally closed. Everyone was urged to join [email protected] .

We had shared a form with DMers to collect ideas for future activities of D{M}Ahmedabad. Suggestions have come for conducting data workshops, and apart from opening up data, using data in some way to help decision making. It was also suggested to have sessions for people who are not well versed in data technology to learn from. I guess we are looking ahead for some interesting workshops and data parties. A few members have indicated that they could conduct sessions in future meetups. Gentlemen, we will be knocking your doors soon !

On another note, the group was almost entirely made of men, with just three women in attendance. Thank you Vishakha, Tanushree and Bhuvana for joining. We hope that our next meetup will have more of you.

A big thanks to Mr. Niraj Jani for agreeing to host us at SAATH, and for the tea. Thank you Aditya@Folo for bringing us yummy samosas.

Please stay tuned for our second meetup in April !!

Bangalore, GeoBLR

Olacabs at GeoBLR

February 15, 2015 Sajjad Anwar 3 Comments

Last week, we gathered at the Paradigm Shift cafe in Koramangala, to learn about the location data infrastructure at Olacabs.com. The meetup was particularly interesting in the light of Ola’s recent move adding autorickshaws to their offering. Location is at the center of Ola’s business.

Vijayaraghavan Amirisetty, Director of Engineering at Olacabs, introduced how they collect data in real-time from cars fitted with smartphones. With over a lakh vehicles online at any given time, Ola’s primary challenge is to build an infrastructure to allocate taxis to customers quickly and reliably. Vijay highlighted some of the issues around collecting location data via GPS and cell networks. Even though both the technologies have matured since their inception, they are highly unreliable in various scenarios. Ola uses a combination of algorithms to build a reliable layer over GPS and network. One thing to note is that the smartphones are of variable quality and the system needs to work regardless of these metrics.

Even though Ola is using Google Play services as their location aggregator, in India, network is a bigger challenge. Quality varies from city to city and also reception within a city in unpredictable. Ola falls back to SMS, driver’s phone and a set of offline algorithms if the network is unavailable. Ola’s infrastructure is built using technologies like MongoDB, MySQL, Cassandra, Redis and Elastic Search. They are also exploring integrating web sockets and an experimental custom Android mod.

There was a lot of feedback from the audience specifically around why it is difficult for the drivers to locate the customer. Driver training is not an easy task – there are a lot of logistical and operational challenges. Vijay emphasised on the amount of work Ola does to improve the drivers’ experience with the whole process of on-boarding their cars.

Everything at Ola is realtime – why would anyone book an auto through Ola if they can just walk out and get one in less than a minute. They are continuing to improve and innovate to revolutionize transportation in Indian cities.

Autorickshaw photo CC 2.0 Spiros Vathis

DataMeet-Up, Delhi

{Delhi} Jan 28th Planning Meeting

February 12, 2015 Nisha Thompson

Delhi DataMeet – Jan 28th

On the 28th of Jan Delhi DataMeet met to discuss their plans for the next year and to pick new organizers since Sumandro is leaving Delhi.

Nisha then summarized what was happening with DataMeet central and the other chapters.
Amitangshu – when you think of DataMeet we think about through the sector we work in. How does translate to the overall goal and become a common idea to all of us?
Updates on NIC
- NDSAP Cell new’s head BN Satyapati
- Data.Gov.iIn team is the team that is managing MyGov.in – resources have been moved to MygGov – can we push mygov to do open data things? People have to suggest open data activities on MyGov.in. Something we can do?

We started out with introductions and with the following questions.

What should be the purpose of DataMeet Delhi?
How can DataMeet Delhi add value to your own work?
What activities/events should DataMeet Delhi do during the next year?

In order to find out the answer to the above questions post it notes were passed out and people were asked what they thought the purpose of DataMeet Delhi should be and what activities do they want to do in the following year.

Purpose/Value

awareness and knowledge about the global movement of open data – nuances/ policy/politics
open data advocacy intervention in policy decision making, (think about other policies and portals in other ministries) (if you get buy in and it can move it forward) workshops, [bridging to osm – Satya] – advocating with various public officials – important thing to do.
DataMeet has members with excellent data skills – students what to learn data tools – people interested in teaching and students learning more about data skills – help people use and learn data tools- help students – basic and small workshops – Ravi
1. when working with students – causes more due diligence – do it with an outside audience –
2. hold them in north and south campus – in a college.
3. focused result workshops with journalists – focused with practical ends – training
4. Student Workshops – Ravi, Krishnan, Nisha, Guneet, will work together to plan a few for March, April
open community, talks, organization, regular talks, conference
act like a platform – teach learn and doing
talks, half day and 1 day hacks, areas to work, data entreauapneirship, public policy (budget state and local) – WASH, tie up with startups – startups and private sector come in and talk about their issues and using data – start up tie in does help with advocacy – lobbying/legal political advisories – open source data conversation
1. let’s think about specific audiences, there are so many catalogues – list of all the catalogues of different sources and mash up data
2. use gov data, collect public data and speak with them about publishing data, data tools service
team up with non for profits and help them solve their problems – break thru -woman’s group – support them – ashoka, idrc, go thru them and see who needs help – later in the year – happy to solve them – take them up as they challenging etc
1. Non Profits – submit problems and we can take them up as they come up and make that a focus on the DataMeet
2. helping NGOS – on board with what they want to achieve – figure out the larger things
data problems – data successes – inspire and learn and connect
work more with start ups – spread open data ideas
1. side meetings – working with gov, ngo’s and startups – sumandro, raman,
work with lamp fellows, prime minister rural fellows
1. Government – we should be willing to help the government as well – government isn’t easy to work with and is time intensive

TEACHING, LEARNING, DOING – The above purpose and values can be categorized under this mantra.

teaching students
doing advocacy and ngo solves problems
compiling casestudies
give rewards – push it to happen
make sure datameet gets credited
open data success stories

CALENDAR

Feb –

Gurgoan budget data – Namrehta – interested in knowing more about what is happening – ongoing – state prs people – ADR – state chapter – city budget – ties into the overall state budget – income into city from state – and vice versa – long campaign – filing a PIL – ongoing – do a non profit – learning training thing
Assembly election in FEb

March

budget data ramanjit cheema,- bring groups who work on budget together – AI, CBGA
out in the open themed pecha kucha

June

capacity building with civil society groups
session of learning and- need to dismystify the tech heavy agenda of the group

July

AKVO event – water sanitation – manifesto what are the data gaps – bring them together – talk about data and shareing and advocacy – formats – INdia Wash Forum

Oct

Public transport data – Guneet, Namrehta,

Dec

Malnutrition

Nov

Open Data Camp

New Organizers of Delhi Data Meet!!!

Guneet, Isha, and Prachi!!!

Thanks to everyone for a great meeting! If I missed anything please add to the comments!

Bangalore, City, Events, GeoBLR

GeoBLR in 2015 – Mapping Unmapped Places!

January 15, 2015 Sajjad Anwar

To kick things off in 2015, we met at the offices of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bengaluru to map the unmapped/less-mapped settlements along the proposed Delhi-Mumbai Infrastructure Corridor (DMIC) project. The DMIC, a 1,483 km-long development corridor spanning several states in northern and western India, has been attracting a lot of curiosity and criticism from the national and international participants and observers. The project will have built a dedicated freight corridor, several industrial and logistics hubs, and smart cities at its completion. The project has been structured to be constructed in phases. The pilot project for an integrated smart city, Dholera Special Investment Region (SIR), is underway.

The quality of mapping in many regions relies on a very active mapping community, or a strong interest from a collectives and local networks. We think it is important regardless to map the assets that pre-exist around the proposed sites of developments. With this in mind, we decided to take a look at the areas earmarked for the Dholera SIR (Gujarat), Shendra (Maharashtra), Mhow (Madhya Pradesh), and Dadri/ Greater Noida (NCR). The evening began with Tejas introducing the DMIC project, the scale of new development, and the need to capture these changes for years to come on OpenStreetMap (OSM). Sajjad provided a rapid tutorial on signing up for OSM, and using the browser-based map editor. The party was attended by guests at CIS as well as remotely from Bangalore and Dharamsala.

As the party progressed, several guests ended up mapping roads, buildings, and water bodies in the Dholera region. Others chose to similarly map Shendra, and Dadri.

DataMeet-Up, Mumbai

Mumbai Meet 4: Data Cleaning

December 8, 2014 Ritvvij Parrikh

Mumbai had it’s fourth data meet on December 6, 2014 with a total of 11 participants. Due to scheduling issues, the November meet-up was moved from last Saturday of the month to the first Saturday of December. This time the meet-up was held at Pykih’s office on 8th floor at Sardar Patel Institute Of Technology.

The speaker was Bhavin Dalal, Senior Technology Manager, from Hansa Cequity.
At Cequity, he plays multiple role not limiting to solution architect, consultant & project manager. While he has strong product framework knowledge , his expertise lies in data warehousing technologies.

Bhavin spoke on two main topics:

1. Data Cleaning – he explained what is Data Quality and which factors determine the quality of data. He briefed through the common Data quality problems faced while cleaning the data. He showed us an example where they faced problems while cleaning car data and how they solved it. He also explained data cleaning methods which will helped us to understand the approaches towards data cleaning, the importance to do data cleaning and some do’s and don’t while capturing data.

2. Visualising census data for better understanding India – here he gave us eye popping fact list revolving around the census data. This topic gave us the better understanding that there are plethora of data points which can be meaningfully used to come up with really good insights on Indian population.

The next data meet will be held on last Saturday of December 2014. Please follow the Mumbai Meet-Up Group to know about the details.

To Do list

Resources

DataMeet is a community of Data Science and Open Data enthusiasts.