In association with: The National Council of Education, Bengal.

Sponsored by: Open Knowledge Micro Grants

Events Partner: MeraEvents

BOOK YOUR ENTRY PASS NOW!

http://www.meraevents.com/event/india-open-data-summit

Open Knowledge India is organizing the India Open Data Summit on February 28, 2015. This year’s event is free for anyone to attend. There will be talks and workshops relating to Open Data, Open Science, Open Research and Open Education. The thrust this year will be on creating a sustainable and viable citizen driven, crowd sourced environment for Open Data. See you there!

The event is intended to be a melting pot of ideas.

Venue: Indumati Sabhagriha, 188, Raja S C Mallick Road, Kolkata – 700032, Beside Jadavpur University Campus.

Time: 10:30 am

Anyone* can attend the event for free and there is no provision for tickets. However, seats are limited and therefore, it will be wise to come early to the venue and register your name.

Spread the word. Bring your friends along. Use the hashtag #OpenIndia.

• If required, the organisers will have the right to deny entry to anyone, whose presence they find to be detrimental to the smooth functioning of the event.

This is post 4 of 5 in the Open Data India series, following Lucy and Laura’s visit to India to learn about the challenges and opportunities for open data. Read previous posts from Bangalore, Chennai and Mumbai.

Our final stop in India was Delhi. Several people had told us that Delhi was the ‘policy capital’ of India, which seemed a fitting finale to our journey. By the time we arrived, we were excited and intrigued about who the meet-up would draw.

Our meet-up was held at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP). Entering a room full of microphones was daunting for a moment! But the warmth of the group shone through, and soon everyone was participating freely in the intense discussion that characterised all of our Indian meet-ups.

The group was perhaps the most diverse that we encountered. It included Wikimedians, academics, people from NIC, NIPFP and ICAR, as well as someone from the FOSS community, members of Accountability India, open access advocates and others. We were also pleased that the gender balance was much more equal in Delhi!

The Discussion

The suggestion of holding a meetup had been bubbling under the surface of the Delhi NGO scene for quite a while. Agendas had been drafted but the meetups had never taken place. Building on the discussions in Bangalore, Chennai and Mumbai, we were asked whether the purpose of the meeting could be to try and find ‘solutions’ to some of India’s issues surrounding open data.

Encouraging the group first to highlight the problems they had encountered, we promised to share our experiences and how we had seen similar issues tackled in other places. So what were the issues?

• Lack of clarity about whether data released in response to an RTI request can be republished, and how it can be used. A new dimension explored at this meet-up was the possibility that private or personal information may sometimes be released in response to an RTI filing. There was no definitive conclusion as to whether this could happen or what would happen if that were then shared further, but it provoked some interesting discussion.

• Standards of Data reliability. Many of the people in the room were researchers by profession and used to collecting their own data. They posed the question, “How can we be sure that data released openly is reliable?”. A discussion followed about how the quality of open data could be ensured, particularly when data was often remixed and re-used. The group started elucidating a vision for some kind of recognition system, traceable trackbacks/referencing, and ‘quality assurance stars’ for data released openly.

• Resistance to the concept of sharing data, even within NGOs. Many people feel a sense of ownership over data they have collected themselves. Some resent the idea that others could benefit from their work, and there is also resistance to sharing data for fear that the researcher’s name could be associated with inaccurate conclusions. Some of the NGOs even encountered resistance when trying to share their own data! People viewed this ‘generosity’ with suspicion, and feared a hidden agenda.

Stories shared

<

p>

The Wikimedia community in particular had much to contribute based on their own experiences. They shared anecdotes about how politically charged certain topics could become in India – e.g. when a map incorrectly displayed the national borders around India provoked tensions with neighbouring countries. They also detailed some of the more unusual dilemmas they had encountered. What, for example, is the copyright situation if you take a picture of a monument in the street?

There was also some interesting discussion about whether data had a ‘release’ period, where, like a work of art or literature, it would pass into the public domain. We speculated that that would depend on contractual agreements and the nature of the data concerned, but if you can shed any more light on the situation regarding this in India (or elsewhere), please do get in touch!

Conversations still to be had…

The discussion left us with many threads to follow up as topics for the next meetup, which we hope Chirag and team will be organising in a couple of months. Keen to get things moving quickly, various options for the next meeting were floated. These included formulating a list of demands from CSOs towards government, discussing open data standards, understanding copyright (formulating a list of questions and attempting to get them answered), dealing with authenticity of data, an introduction to open data in an Indian context and the benefits of open data for education and research.

We touched on many of these topics briefly, but two hours was just not long enough to cover them all. Although the conversation was still flowing, we did eventually have to let people get home!

It would be great to hear of this group meeting again to explore some of these areas further. Do join the India mailing list to stay in touch.

… And one more meet-up!

We had scheduled the ‘official’ Delhi meet-up on a Thursday evening, but a mid-week meet-up – particularly on the eve of Krishna Janmashtami! – didn’t work for everyone. Some people who had been unable to attend the meet-up told us that they were free over the weekend, so Lucy and I decided to hold an informal ‘open table’ at the United Coffee House on Saturday afternoon.

Chatting over a plate of Dilli chaat (sadly not actually bought on the street!), we heard much to excite us about the future of open data in India. There were ideas for an ‘Open Access Week’, plans to start collecting the data submitted in response to RTI requests, questions about promoting data journalism and plenty of enthusiasm, inspiration and fresh ideas. Watching new friends swap numbers after the meeting, we were sorry to be leaving the community that had so warmly welcomed us – but we hope that the conversations will continue both online with us and offline without us.

In the next post, Lucy and I will showcase some of the organisations that we met whilst in India, and explore some of the open data projects that we witnessed.

This is post 3 of 5 of the Open Data India series, following Lucy and Laura’s visit to learn about the challenges and opportunities for open data. Read previous posts from Bangalore and Chennai on the main blog.

After joining forces with the DataMeet group in Bangalore and Transparent Chennai’s open data workshop, we were prepared for the challenge of ‘going it alone’ when we decided to arrange an open data meet-up in Mumbai.

Seriously soggy!

Thanks to @prolificd and @Netra, we had an excellent venue for the Mumbai meet-up. The Pinstorm offices have hosted Wikimedia gatherings in the past, and are a great space for fresh thinking and debate. The real challenge proved to be getting around Mumbai itself. As we soon grasped, Mumbai is an enormous city, and suffers from heavy traffic and – as we witnessed! – torrential monsoon rains. Probably for a combination of these reasons, our Mumbai meet-up drew the smallest crowd of the trip and was a very cosy affair.

The Discussion

Despite (or perhaps because of!) the select group, the evening was productive. Conversation was wide-ranging, and included:

YourTopia India

The original YourTopia calculates which European country best aligns with your values, by allowing you to weight the relative importance of different indicators. An Italian version – YourTopia Italy – has since been created, which compares regions of Italy. Pranav Sidhwani is now working to produce something similar for the different states of India.

Pranav pointed out the wider value of YourTopia. Not only is it a valuable tool in and of itself, but it requires several key datasets including e.g. health, education and employment data to be collected. The act of gathering these data sets is a major first step for open data in India. All data gathered will be stored on the Datahub.

• To get involved with the YourTopia India project, sign up to the YourTopia list.

Licensing

As in Bangalore, the group identified a real problem with a lack of explicit licensing. If material isn’t licensed – whether openly or otherwise – there is serious ambiguity over how it can be used.

In Mumbai, we were offered an interesting perspective on the origins of this issue. It was suggested that culturally, copyright has a different history in India [1]. Arguably, the ongoing legacy of this is that people are less likely to consider issues of licensing when publishing or re-using data. Anecdotally, it has been organisations such as Wikimedia who have objected to the re-use of unlicensed material in India.

Whatever the history, it remains clear that encouraging people to apply a license – any license – is one of the key changes that will allow re-users to work appropriately and confidently with data.

Understanding Data

As in Bangalore, the group affirmed that many people struggled to interpret basic visualisations such as bar charts and line graphs. However, it was drawn to our attention that under the IT@School initiative, Kerala has seen the world’s largest simultaneous deployment of FOSS based ICT education. I hadn’t come across this project before, and am interested to explore further how early exposure to FOSS software and familiarity with ICT will impact upon this generation.

Other topics of conversation at the meet-up included the potential and challenges of open data for cultural heritage, GLAM, science, agriculture, and even for understanding the impact of planetary motion on agricultural outputs. There was much to discuss!

Useful Links

As always, we were introduced to several interesting databases, projects and websites at the meet-up. Here are just a few of the initiatives which were discussed.

• Visualdata.in – @prolificd’s project, which builds visualisations based on publicly available data sets.
• MOPSI – Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation – a useful site home to a significant amount of data, although in my recent exploration, I struggled to find any information on licensing.
• Parliamentary Legislative Research – presents analyses of data related to parliament; allows you to track bills, to view key statistics on parliament, to track the attendance of your MP etc. Deploys a non-commercial license; I struggled to find raw data on the site.

Wishlist

Much as in Bangalore, the wishlist included:

• More data, and better availability of data that has already been collected
• More data in a machine-readable format
• Better tools for people who want to work with data
• More uniformity around the data – what is collected, where it is gathered

All in all it was a great evening. Although the group was small, it was wonderful to meet excellent OKFN volunteers such as Pranav in person, to link up with the Wikimedia community, and to chat to others with a potential interest in open data. To keep this discussion going, please sign up to the India mailing list.

[1] For a brief overview of the history of copyright in India, see http://archive.icommons.org/articles/a-very-brief-history-of-copyright-development-in-india.

This is part 2 of 5 of the Open Data India Series. You can read the first post ‘Open Data – Bangalore’ on the OKFN blog.

Chennai, formerly Madras, is only a short train ride away from Bangalore. Laura and I hadn’t been intending on travelling to Chennai on this trip, but a mail from Nithya Raman from Transparent Chennai on learning that we would be in India at the time of their Open Data Camp promised that, ‘the enthusiasm of my team to learn would make you glad you came’. That sounded like a tempting offer, so Laura and I packed our bags and headed down the hill to the coast to lead a workshop on open data, and what we had learnt from the previous two weeks in Bangalore…

Transparent Chennai & the Workshop

Transparent Chennai collects, creates, and disseminates maps, data, and research to support citizen advocacy, largely focussing on issues related to the urban poor. They were the first NGO on the trip to ask us how to open up data which they had got originally from governments through right to information requests and added value to, so that other people could benefit from their work. Via their website, you can build your own maps of Chennai with layers ranging from flyovers and special road projects, census data by Ward, slum information from the Slum Clearance Board and location of public toilets from data which they have meticulously compiled from various sources with their tiny, 6-person team. (More information on the data and the map layers).

The Transparent Chennai team had put together a lively workshop with topics ranging from What is data? through Open Data and picking the correct visualisation for your data, to live mapping sessions. Sessions were delivered to an audience made up largely of NGOs, many of whom had travelled from far and wide to be there.

Questions and debate flowed about where the boundaries should be drawn with what should be made open, licensing and even how and when to use specific services, such as OpenCorporates. We hope these discussion will continue.

For the benefit of those in the workshop, here is our presentation and some of the links we mentioned in answer to the questions:

• OpenDefinition.org – the Open Definition, the underlying principle behind everything that we do.
• DataHub.io – we mentioned when explaining how we ourselves show the steps when working with data, to ensure that anyone can track and replicate our working.
• Licensing questions. We were delighted to hear that some of the NGOs present in the workshop were considering openly licensing some of the data they had collected themselves and wanted to know which licence to pick. There are still lots of grey areas to iron out where derivative works from government data is concerned; for example, Transparent Chennai were not sure whether they could release government datasets to which they had added geographic markers under an open licence. For this type of question, our recommendation would be to drop the community of experts and lawyers a message via the Open Definition discussion list.

Oh, and yes, we were glad we came (very!). Thank you Nithya for the invite, and we look forward to hearing a lot more from Transparent Chennai!

Next stop in the Open Data in India series – Mumbai.

The Bangalore data scene is huge. A bustling IT and data mining industry means that you are never far away from the nearest data miner or analyst, and at the Fifth Elephant Conference, the data crowd prowled for the best tips, biggest data and newest discoveries. The Fifth Elephant was our first port of call and Laura Newman and I were there to conduct workshops on the School of Data and OpenSpending…

The workshops were at capacity and a learning experience for both teacher and students, with some really interesting questions being asked. In the School of Data, Laura gave a first taste of what was in store in the School of Data, which is due to launch this autumn. The workshop ‘challenge’ involved reverse engineering a Guardian article on the World’s Worst Carbon Emitters, which shows India scoring pretty badly if looked at as a country, but pretty well if looked at on a per capita basis. After some discussion of cleaning, manipulating and analysis techniques, participants were encouraged to find their own stories in data. A few surprises were in store; despite being quite a technical audience, many had little or no experience with spreadsheet programmes, and were very interested to learn what they could do with them. At the end of the class, a few even stole away into a corner to carry on experimenting. Extra credit due to these two…

Next up, the OpenSpending workshop produced a flurry of great questions, “How much does OpenSpending know about your data? Does it have a concept of what is revenue and what is spending?”, “Can you compare real vs planned expenditure?”, “Are there any time-series visualisations?”, and also a flurry of volunteers, wanting to know how they could get involved. A discussion on how important it is to show your working, a tutorial on Google Refine for cleaning messy spending data appeared well-received and one nail-biting live demonstration on a flaky internet connection later, we had a high-level visualisation of the general shape of the Indian Expenditure Budget showing how much money in 2012 is planned to go on on debt servicing vs planned and non-plan expenditure…

See the data we used and how we wrangled it for these visualisations on the Datahub.

Open Data Meets the Datameeters

On from those who mine big data to those who struggle to get access to the majority of the datasets which they need in order to be able to do their jobs. We came to India with the mission of finding out what the local challenges are in getting, working with, sharing and publishing data, and this first group gave us some great insights into that. We had no idea how many people we were expecting, but we settled in the courtyard as the first few arrived, a journalist from Citizen Matters magazine, the team behind Babajob.com who had been running some data analysis on job demand and supply, programmers, designers and data enthusiasts… and then they came in droves! We moved into a meeting room at Java, which was soon packed full.

With more people of a corporate background than many of the Open Data Meetups we have had here in the UK, big data and data which was key for analysis was a hot topic, but then conversation turned to what the issues facing open data in India were. Here are a couple of thoughts from the group members:

• Key problems include knowing who to approach to get data. Often, you need to have a personal connection in order to get hold of the relevant data. You also have to tread carefully with data once you have it, so as to preserve relationships for the future.
• Most people want to collect data themselves rather than trusting ‘second hand’ data collected by the government. (Someone threw out the question to the room, “Which data do you trust more, government or crowdsourced?” the response echoed round the room: “crowdsourced!”.)
• Too few people actually analyse data. In many cases, once people have got hold of the data they don’t know what to do with it.
• Very unclear what the legal/copyright situation is with data that has been obtained from an RTI (Right To Information request). We heard this refrain of uncertainty over and over again at the various meet ups. To the best of the group’s knowledge, no-one had ever been charged for releasing data that was given to them in response to an RTI request. However, anecdotally one person had been requested to cease analyses on government data – and did stop.

The conclusion of the evening was a discussion around what the key datasets were and what people wanted to see released. The old reliable post-it notes came pouring in and here’s what people wanted:

Government data/ legal

• Municipality budget data (held by BBMP)
• Data regarding performance of government schemes (Planning Commission of India)
• Data about whistleblowers, follow-up action, people involved, data by state
• Data on where taxes are spent
• Detailed data about MPs (no more details provided)
• Macro-economic data
• Numbers / Ports of entry of refugees / migrants / aliens (given that India shares open borders with two countries)
• Judgements and orders of lower courts
• Legislation and amendments

Transport data

• Railway ticket movement data – are trains really sold out when they say they are? (Indian Railways)
• Bangalore transit data. Where are the bus stops? Where are the timetables? – questions which are often local knowledge in India and passed on by word of mouth. The ambitious even ask for real time location data for buses.

Water data

• Data on ground water

Land/Geography

• Urban land usage
• Land ownership, sale, transfer and litigation in progress
• Access to geodata/ shapefiles/ area-based maps
• Amount of forest cover (from the Forest Survey of India – 2 votes)
• Infrastructure database

Census Data

• Data from 2011

Education & Schools

• Education Department Data, on the level of training held by teachers (MHRD)

Cultural

• All historical tests owned by the Archaeological Survey of India

Weather data

• Long term, high resolution, daily climate data in real time

Other

• Nobel Prize nominations
• Automobile cost data & how much duty paid (Excise & Custom)
• List of blocked websites
• Anonymised aggregate cell phone locations over time

It would be great to see another meetup on open data in Bangalore as the topic gets its roots established, getting deeper into the subject, getting policymakers involved, perhaps building on this list of requests.

We’d like to say a huge thank you to the Datameet group for allowing us to theme one of their meetups around open data. They are a huge and very active group of Data Science enthusiasts in India which meet online (and organise their offline meetings) via a Google Group. Membership spans many diverse communities connected by a common interest in data. Some of the members of the datameet group have also been driving discussion on the OKFN India mailing list, where talk is specifically about open data. We’d also like to thank Aditya Hari, who volunteered to find us a venue, and to the fantastic venue, Jaaga, themselves, who let us invade the wonderful courtyard cafe and the atmospheric orange room.