Open Data and Education

Alok and Shivangi were part of an interesting event last week. As part of David Cameron's flying visit to Bangalore, senior officials from the British government (including those behind http://data.gov.uk) were in Bangalore and were keen on learning more about the situation of open government data and civic
hacking in India/Bangalore.

There was discussion on the technology tools people in India have been working on with government data, and the difficulty of obtaining that data after which there was a session on coding/modifying into existence available government data.

They came up with a beautiful visualization to capture the work we do in schools:

There is also a write-up in the Guardian:

The key event of the trip was a hackday hosted by Google India in the southern central city of Bangalore.

I have to confess a slight colonial attitude going into the meet. Thinking of the UK as a great hacking nation and leading data port, I was expecting to be helping the collected Indian IT professionals and activists improve their skills and give them fresh ideas on how to bootstrap their democracy.

However, our Indian counterparts very quickly astonished us with brilliant and powerful data projects and grass roots hacks using simple tools and technologies to solve everyday civic issues. Some of which I wanted to exhibit here.

We'd like to thank Pranesh from CIS India for inviting us to be a part of this event.