Open DataCamp – Bangalore’13

I attended and gave a part of talk at Open Data Camp, Bangalore 2013, which was scheduled on 2nd and 3rd  March’13. ~200 people participated in the camp from different fields.  I met lot of smart people and had a great time. Sessions I attended :-

Visualizing Politics: S Anand
Anand took the data from 2004 Lok Sabha election, which he got from ECI website and showed lot of interesting facts and stats on the India’s map. His presenstation is available here.

As usual there was lot lot to learn from his talk.

data.gov.in – Alka Mishra
Alka gave overview about data.gov.in, which is an Indian Government initiative to open-up data from different government departments. She shared the policies and processes through which data.gov.in is collecting datasets from different departments. data.gov.in is currently working with Central Government but some of the states also shown interest.

She understood the concerns of the data enthusiasts that most of time, the data on the government websites is not in usable format. She said now there are such polices that the different departments have to submit the data in a standardize format.She urged for more participation from the citizens on the data.gov.in. She said that we can request for any specific datasets. Her session was following by a panel discussion “Why Open Data is Good for Gov and Citizens alike”.

Big Data and Hadoop in Indian Context – Mohan Kumar
Speaker mentioned some interesting facts and have an overview of Big Data and Hadoop.

Panel Discussion: What has Open Data got to with UIDAI? – Sunil Abraham, Anivar Aravind and Anant Maringanti.
This was most interesting session I attended at ODC. It came as total surprise to me. The panelists discussed whats not so open about the UIDAI

An Introduction to Apache Hadoop – Mrinal Wadhwa
On day-2, I attended half day session on Apache Hadoop. Mrinal gave really good overview on Hadoop. For what tasks we should use Hadoop and when we are better off with RDBMS. I enjoyed this session as there was lot to learn.

I gave following talk with Rajesh K, Meera K, and Vineet.
Public Problem Solving using Data: Lessons from the Daksh Survey

 DAKSH  is an independent, professional, apolitical, not-for-profit organization based in Bangalore, which surveyed people of Karnataka to see how their respective MLA performed. Through Rajesh I came to know that they needed someone to analyse the collected data and come up with a score card for each MLA. I volunteered and did the analysis. Following shows the overall exercise we did as a group:-

The score card for each MLA was published in Vijay Karnataka, which is a leading Kanada News Paper.  Rajesh started the talk  by the introduction to Public Problem Solving. After that Vineet introduced the audience to Daksh. Then  I share the steps which I used to analyse the collected Data. Later Meera showed how Citizen Matters is using the results collected from above exercise, which a very small part of overall effort which her team is putting to collect the stats for each MLA. The audience were surprised to how people from different fields came together and worked on this.

Following is a picture of mine showing the score-card  of MLAs which was published on Vijay Karnataka. Thanks to Meera Sankar for taking the pic.

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