Open Data Day 2014

Open Data Day kickoff in kathmandu, Nepal at GPF building where open community like FOSS Nepal, Wikipedia Nepal, Open Knowledge Nepal, Mozilla Nepal and other community gather in the same place to celebrate it. In this day Mozilla Nepal team visualize the data with the help of thimble, Open Spending Nepal introduce portfolio of openspendingnepal.org like wise wikipedia Nepal was lauching their wiki school in the event. 

This event was taken lead by Wikipedia Nepal with the collaboration of other open community, in open data day we had quite numbers of visitor who are interested about concept of openness. I was in openspending team so I couldn't attend formal discussion but from the visitor we had found they are quite interested about "open community" in Nepal. 

In data day our main focus was to launched our portfolio openspendingnepal.org which will track every Nepal government spending and visualized in the simple matter so it can be understand by normal citizen to data geek. Likewise the data we will be visualizing will be from authentic website and concern department, data will be in readable format and can be used any where. In this website we had added some feature like about comment method where normal citizen can comment about spending and budget they get in their area where it is spend correctly or not so that later government can review these comment making their survey and giving full effort to the development of nation.

Wikipedia education program

A week long Wikipedia education program which was started in 2nd February,2014 was successfully completed at 7th February, 2014. This class was basically focused for the new students (early bird students), class was taken by the Wikipedia driving licence holder from the Wikipedia Education program 1. Srijan Karki, Bishal Bhandari, Manish Dangol and Anupam Poudel had taken lead for class. 

First class was completed by giving short introduction about Wikipedia, local community and how to contribute in the wikipedia in English as well as in local languagae.  Second day was started with making the account of each student in the class and the students who had already completed making account are helping other students to create the account. After successfully making the account in Wikipedia students were taught how to write in Nepali Unicode short introduction about typing in Nepali unicode. As students were not much familiar with the Nepali Unicode keyboard layout it make them really hard to write in Nepali language but still all students became patient and start to learn the layout. In the 3rd day of class, it was about how to make user page and how to work in the sandbox. In the 4th class it was about choosing the topic where Hempal sir help students on it. In 5th class students taught about referencing in the wikipedia as it is crucial part for any writer to back up there writing. In final class students were less in number because in previous class students were told to prepare themselves for the presentation about wikipedia and what they had learn from the class.

Even wikipedia class was for short time it was really helpful for them as they know how to contribute in wikipedia, type in Nepali Unicode, concept of research, referencing making userpage, article and much more. From Wikipedia education program 1 what we learn in 2 months we try to teach everything in a week for new student we feel time was not enough for us still we need to teach more for them alot. Likewise in our 1st education program in this class to we face same problem like could not make more than 6 account at a time, lost connection. Still facing those problem, we finally completed short and fast wikipedia education program to new students. I would like to thanks to our college team, Nepali Wikipedia Community, and friends, for making this event successful.