A bunch of UK and Indian geeks gathered at Google office while Cameron was praising Sachin at Infosys campus. It was a kind of unconference made possible by CIS, with the UK Government’s Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office Team for Digital Engagement and Google. The discussions were around open data in India ( the lack of it) and UK, and possible ‘civic hacking’ of the data.

Started with general introductions of who they are, what they are working on and problems they have faced, in terms of getting data and pushing back into the main stream.
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Crossposted from Janaagraha.

Three months back when I was introduced to iJanaagraha, by Jaagte Raho! Coordinator Jasmine Shah, I was struck by the amount of geographic and ward data that Bangalore based Not-for-profit Janaagraha wanted to publish. That was the time when Data.Gov was live and developers all around the world were going crazy. I was wondering at the potential of IJ as a developer platform and not just as a social network. It was time to stop wondering and start working towards it.

As you know the biggest inspiration for us was data.gov and data.gov.uk. where the government of US and UK share the raw government data for developers to use. Using data provided by the government, there has been mashups like flyOnTime, visualization of health records and many more interesting and helpful applications.

For example Janaagraha’s Ward Infrastructure and Assessment (WISA) project has ranking data for each of the wards. Think about an application which maps WISA data to land/rent costs in that area. I guess it will be of great help when you want to choose your neighborhood. So it makes much sense to expose the data.

We are still in the early phase of developing the data and map APIs. As much as I want all kind of APIs exposed, I will have to keep check due to available resources. We will start with exposing OpenSocial and limited WISA data. That will probably serve as a pilot. If we find that developers are using the data in a useful way we could get the rest of the data and maps.

Above all IJ is social network which gives information, tools and network to socialites. It provides OpenSocial platform for external developers to launch relevant tools on IJ. Hence in a way, we are providing both a platform and data for interested developers to add those additional functionalities that we haven’t even dreamnt of. Now I am just waiting for the launch.

– Thejesh G N –

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Thejesh is the Technology and Community Manager at Janaagraha. He can be contacted at thej@janaagraha.org

What makes Facebook or twitter or Flickr successful? Is it the community of users? is it the usefulness of the product? is it the uniqueness?

I think it’s all above and set of passionate developers who used the APIs and created extensions with above mentioned characteristics. Yes. According to me developers who used Twitter or FB APIs to create additional, useful and sometimes unique experiences around the core functionalities are also responsible for the success.

When I joined Janaagraha to work on IJ, one of my ideas was to create network of developers who could creatively use the technologies and data. But most of my initial time went in conceptualizing and building IJ as platform. Now that IJ’s build is in final stages. I have started to work on developer community concept.

There was also question about building a dedicated IJ community or generic community. After some discussions with friends. Taking pros and cons of these two different approaches, we settled down for generic community of technologists who are interested in NGO sector.

As a start, I created a Google group for discussion and git repository for code. Even though you might see me talking about Janaargaha and how technology is used inside Janaagraha. It shouldn’t stop developers from talking about technologies used in other NGOs. The whole point is to use technology for the welfare of human beings ( i know big words). I have never curated a developer community. I think it’s a big challenge for me personally and professionally. I have been part of many developer platform groups. I am going to use my experience as a participant there to curate this community. I hope that works. I have been reading a lot about this recently. I found this presentation interesting

Send me some interesting ideas or reads/links. Oh yeah, I forgot. IJ as such is a great platform to develop urban civic related applications. We have data, maps and above all OpenSocial to make it easy. Keep an eye. I will write a blog post. Better join the group. And there are some code snippets on github already.

BTW Christian Heilmann is my role model.

I cant believe, its been three months already! Initially the idea was to write one blog post per week. But then the work did not allow me :) Now that its been three months and the projects that I am working on have stabilized to great extent, I have time to write. Here is the first installment. Better late than never or like our Rajani sir says “late but latest”.

Information about two of big projects which I am involved are *technically* out in the public. You already know something about them from the newspapers. Let me give you little more. I guess it will be of interest to developers than casual readers.

iJanaagraha
IJanaagraha, ij in short is a hybrid of social network, information and tools portal focusing on citizen, Govt and citizenship. As of now we have a simple version running on the domain. But we have been working on the reloaded version for about four months now. I am playing multiple roles in this project (like in any startup) and trying to give as much as possible. I am very exited with the functionalities we are trying to build into it. I feel its very unique kind of site. Even though we don’t have exact dates for the launch. I am expecting it to be online by middle of this year. It will have OpenSocial developer platform for application development. I am hoping it will be heaven for developers who want to build city based apps. Wait for more announcements on official blog. We have very fun loving and dedicated team as of now and we are still expanding. Let me know if you are interested in full time job/volunteering.
Image credit: bangalore mirror

WISA (aka backbone behind TOIs BangalorePatrol)
There is no way you could miss this if you read TOI-Bangalore. It was on the front page on Apr 7.
WISA – Ward Infrastructure & Services Assessment is an objective way of grading our wards. We are collecting lot of data offline in an objective way. The data goes through various sanity tests and then it gets to go online. Public will be able to see aggregated results. I am trying to get some kind of data out for developers to experiment. Its still very early to give details. I will update you as and when I have something interesting. The WISA project measures a set of urban indicators divided into 7 main categories viz.
1. Mobility
2. Water
3. Electricity
4. Public Health
5. Public Safety
6. Public Amenities
7. Environment & Ecology
For each of this there are lot of indicators (data points) which are collected. Its data analysts heaven. We are working on lot of infographics and in general playing with data. Again dates are not sure but expect in a month or two or three :) so have patience.

Other than these, I write these small apps when I get time. I must say I never realized how three months passed. Part of the credit also goes to the friends I have made here and the rest goes to my traveling from ecity to city :)

One liner: Journey has been great until now.

These days my work mainly involves around government data (or the data that I assume govt should provide). You must have already seen the open data initiatives by both USA (Data.Gov) and UK(data.gov.uk) governments. I am not sure how good or the bad the data is but the initiative as such is a great move. For that matter it is not just countries but the cities like London have opened up their data. I think its high time for democracies like India to open up the data. Well at least the govt bodies of so called silicon valley of India, Bangalore’s BBMP or GOK to begin with.

Imagine raw data you will get to play around, its programmers heaven. Imagine the kind of mashups we can build with election results and geo data. As of today even though we have some kind of data on-line. Its very distributed, not open and of course not developer friendly.

What we need today is an open data initiative, where GOI and state/local govts can publish data in a developer friendly format. Even though I am not an expert, by developer friendly I mean, open standard, online, search-able, semantic data. Unfortunately in India it might take years for Govt to come up with such a plan. So as active citizens, how can we force the govt to that? or should it be taken up by an NGO or Society? or should we the citizens start a simple community project of collecting and publishing data?

Btw as an interim solution I am bookmarking all the Govt related data on delicious with #open-data-india. Feel free to tag/comment more about available data.