About Open Knowledge Nepal

Open Knowledge Nepal is an open network of open knowledge enthusiasts. We are a non-profit organization comprised of openness aficionados, mainly self-motivated youths who believe that openness of data is powerful in order to have a participatory government with civil society, eventually leading to sustainable development. Those self-motivated people are social activists, professors, students, journalists, governments officers and more. The group has been involved in research, advocacy, training, organizing meetups and hackathons, and developing tools related to Open Data, Open Government Data, Open Source, Open Education, Open Access, Open Development, Open Research and others. The group also helps and supports Open Data entrepreneurs and startups to solve different kinds of data related problems they are facing through counseling, training and by developing tools for them.

About Project

Open Data Awareness Program aims to raise awareness about the concept and usage of open data to Nepal’s digital natives, who are the current youth population and the potential future decision-makers and leaders of Nepal. As a part of the program, hands-on training sessions are being organized at different colleges and youth organizations, where participants will be provided with a compiled Open Data Manual to aid their understanding on open data. After the conclusion of the all the workshops at different colleges, a hackathon event will be organized in Kathmandu to bring together selected participants from colleges and youth organizations where the training sessions were held to work collaboratively on opening up data currently in closed format. At the hackathon event, the participants will share their experiences of learning and working with open data, and will discuss on ways to engage more young people in the open data movement in Nepal.

Program Objectives

The objective of the awareness program is to make the youth of Nepal more aware on the benefits of open data, to fill in the gap of data literacy and to better prepare young people for a rapidly changing data scenario. Through the program the university students and youths will learn how to take direct and indirect benefits from open data so that they can use it

1. For research and new projects
2. For new business growth
3. For analysis and reporting
4. To improves the skills of using new data tools and programming languages
5. To build innovative solutions to tackle development challenges

In the workshop, participants will learn about

1. What is open data and why it is of importance
2. Background on and history of open data
3. Open data sources and stories
4. Technical process to extract, analyze, clean and visualize the available data in Nepal

List of Colleges

Some of the college/institutions covered by the project include: