23/10/2017

Sensitizing Nepal’s digital natives: Open Data Awareness Program announced

 

To support Nepal’s growing open data movement and increase its network of data-savvy practitioners, Open Knowledge Nepal has launched the Open Data Awareness Program, which aims to sensitize more than 300 students and youth from seven districts.

The Open Data Awareness Program will 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 of 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 to work collaboratively on opening up data currently in a closed format. At the hackathon event, the participants will share their experiences and discuss ways to engage more young people in Nepal’s open data movement. The awareness program is also an opportunity for increased civic awareness, engagement, and participatory governance.

The program hopes to make the open data momentum in Nepal stronger, especially amongst the youth population. In addition to grooming Nepal’s future leaders and decision-makers to be data driven, as a result of the program, a significant number of human resources will become available to support the current data revolution in Nepal. Most importantly, the program will help improve the chances of more open data startups and initiatives emerging in the near future.

We want to  help the youth of Nepal become more aware of the benefits of open data, filling data literacy gaps, and better preparing them for a rapidly changing data scenario. To this end, participants will be empowered to:

  • Use open data for research and new projects
  • Conduct data analysis and reporting
  • Use new data tools and programming languages
  • Build innovative solutions to tackle development challenges

Throughout workshops, participants will discuss:

  • What is open data and why it is of importance
  • The background and history of open data
  • Open data sources and stories
  • Technical processes to extract, analyze, clean and visualize the available data in Nepal

The awareness program will be based on the Open Data Curriculum and the Open Data Manual, both prepared by Open Knowledge Nepal as a reference and recommended a guide for university students, civil society, and the private sector.

This project is supported by the Data for Development Programme, implemented by The Asia Foundation in partnership with Development Initiatives, with funding from the UK Department for International Development to improve the sharing and use of data as evidence for development in Nepal.

For more project updates regarding workshops, hackathon and resources, please visit project webpage here.

Comments

 
http://datadrivenjournalism.net/news_and_analysis/sensitizing_nepals_digital_natives_open_data_awareness_program_announced
datadrivenjournalism.net
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-05
16612
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:MTZACN3GR54LETGGDLMCJUBXKHJY5CIF
<urn:uuid:9005824b-57e5-49fe-bea6-62aecfc1689f>
2018-01-22T20:13:57Z
77.235.50.178
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:DHPX7HO7QLYFZ36VSVJHOZGXYDK4UWUO
<urn:uuid:90dcdb74-8035-4acd-a970-d46426feca95>
http://datadrivenjournalism.net/news_and_analysis/sensitizing_nepals_digital_natives_open_data_awareness_program_announced
length
response
<urn:uuid:c2e94c86-bd27-4d4b-9ff9-566e9e7fae88>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-68-19.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-05
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf