Month: September 2014

Discussing the hottest topics of the decentralized web at GET-D

„If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” is a more than adequate motto chosen by GET-D‘s organisers to give character to this event, a conference aiming to explore the status, possibilities and challenges of the decentralized web. In its first edition, GET-D took place between the 17th and 19th of September in the amazing Agora Collective space in Berlin-Neukölln.

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Decentralized web is a relatively new topic for many, as it is my case, and completely unknown by the vast majority of the internet users. If you belong to the latter group, let me explain briefly what I understand behind this term: The internet that most of the people use today (let me call it mainstream web) is structured in a centralized manner and a huge percent of the information is stored in big data centres and routed through servers owned by gigantic corporations. This makes possible that we all enjoy great services such as our favourite social networks, search engines and cloud storage services but has several negative implications such as poor inter-operability between information sources and, as you might already be aware of, governments accessing your private data.

As an opposition to the current infrastructure, the decentralized web proposes a much more democratic approach, where logic and storage is more balanced across the nodes of the network. Going back to GET-D’s motto, this idea also supports strongly the principles of collaboration. Because, in order to make things work, every node needs to work with the others. Last but not least, the re-use of resources (being digital information or physical assets) is also one of the main benefits of this approach.

What can we expect from a new and decentralized web?

As part of GET-D’s programme, we had the opportunity to discover very interesting projects that bring a new perspective to aspects of our current digital lives. To mention just a few, we enjoyed the presence of the folks developing Mail Pile, a free, add-free and Open Source email client that you can run on your local machine or server so you actually have total control of your data. Or Leihbar, a platform that tries to shift our consumer society towards a sharing economy. Leihbar envisions a network of boxes spread through the cities, where users can have access to all kind of products for particular occasions: from a projector to watch a movie, through tools for fixing your bike to an inflatable boat to enjoy a day at the lake. This way, we do not need to buy stuff that we are going to use just from time to time, we share it with others.

Internet of things (IoT) is also a hot topic nowadays. We are seeing how all kind of devices are becoming connected to the internet. Cars, public infrastructure or even coffee machines are now capable of interacting with the digital world and between them, in a de-centralized manner. At GET-D, a couple of IoT-related projects were presented: Starting with RiotOS, a free LGPL-licensed operative system for those devices the IoT is being built upon, or Gatesense, a project which encourages the community to imagine and shape the future of this field. With such a vast amount of devices generating tons of information, initiatives are also being launched to help us managing it efficiently. It is the case of Jolocom, a distributed visualisation tool which helps users make sense of complex connections between persons, projects, sensors and devices from the Internet of Things.

Hackaton: After theory it comes coding

I personally enjoyed the hacking sessions. Parallel to a series of interesting presentations and hangouts with folks working on decentralized web projects around the globe, they shaped the 3 days we spent at GET-D. Together with other participants, I worked on a project I would like to introduce here. Portable Linked Profiles (PLP) are set of components which offer an easy way for users, organisations and venues to create their public data, and most important, host it wherever they want. Thanks to its modular design and its Open Source nature, developers can create applications on top of PLP. This applications (named Browsers) would be something like our Open Knowledge directory which aggregates and maps contact information of individuals and organisations working on Open Knowledge worldwide. Expect more details about this on our blog soon.

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Stay tuned for more GET-D

This first edition had already very good outcomes and the great thing is that there will be more to come. The topic of Decentralized web is still in a young state and more research, discussion and implementation is still needed. As we could experience, such an event offers a perfect environment for this and we are looking forward to attending next editions of GET-D.

Software Freedom Day 2014 celebrated in Nepal

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). In Nepal, FOSS Nepal Community has been regularly organizing and celebrating Software freedom day since 2005. From 2007 to 2009, for three consecutive years, FOSS Nepal’s SFD celebration was recognized as the best event in the world. This year also with an aim to enrich the open communities rather than outreach upon the Free and Open Source movement, FOSS Nepal Community organized Software Freedom Day 2014, Kathmandu at Trade Tower (Elite Hall), Thapthali, Kathmandu, Nepal on the date of 20th September 2014. The way of celebration was completely different from the past year software freedom day. This year it was an half day event, where more than 14 different open communities who are currently working under open philosophy gather at the same place and the schedule of the event was also so simple.

Here goes the schedule of an Event.

Communities Like PHP Developers Nepal, Google Developer Group (GDG) Kathmandu, Robotic Association of Nepal (RAN), Wikipedia (Nepali), Mozilla Nepal, Open Street Map (OSM) Nepal, Open Knowledge Nepal, Ruby Developers Nepal, Google Business Group (GBG) Kathmandu, WordPress Nepal, Chitwanix, Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) Nepal and many more was playing an celebrating partners role for this year Software Freedom Day. Event was Supported by Nepal Government Department of Information Technology, Rooster Logic and Computer Association of Nepal (CAN).

As Per the schedule event was officially started by the host Ms. Shristi Baral and Mr. Rajan Kandel, not exactly in the same time according to schedule but 15 minute late because of some management issues. After a short introduction of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Nepal Community and Software Freedom Day 2014, they invited Mr. Sagar Chhetri, first presenter of the event, who was there to give presentation on Chitwanix OS.

Mr. Sagar Chhetri utilized his total 15 minutes by defining what is Chitwanix OS, Chitwanix Student Partners (CSP), Chitwanix Associate Program etc. He said that Chitwanix community is slowly growing and going to make vast impact in the coming future. After his presentation about Chitwanix the event host called Mr. Saroj Dhakal to give presentation and short talk on Nepali Linux & Nirvikalpa. Saroj Dhakal started his presentation form the question: How many of here know about Nepali Linux? And most of the hands inside the hall were raised because Nepali Linux was that first Linux based Nepali operating system which was developed with the help of Nepal Government and Madhan Bhandari Pustaklaya. He said that Nepali Linux is going to reborn again and new version will be released soon. He also gave an short introduction about Nirvikalpa “Nirvikalpa is an collection of Open Source software which can be used at Microsoft Windows too”.

After Saroj Dhakal presentation on Nepali Linux and Nirvikalpa, Host of an event called Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) Nepal Team for their introduction and presentation. LTSP project was lead by the students of Kathmandu University (KU) and all of them where an active member of their college open source community named Kathmandu University Open Source Community (KUOSC). Presenter shows their progress on LTSP and some images.

Now, It was a time for the presentation of Wikipedia (Nepali). Mr. Ganesh Poudel one of the active Wikimedians of Nepal was called on stage for the presentation. His presentation was like progress report and story sharing. He shares how Nepali Wikipedia community is growing day by day and he also gave an open invitation to all participant of Software Freedom Day 2014, to be volunteer of an Nepali Wikipedia and request everyone for the help.

Presentation session continues, after 15 minutes presentation of Nepali Wikipedia, Host called Mr. Nikesh Balami from Open Knowledge Nepal to give short introduction of Open Knowledge Community. Nikesh Balami topic was focused on Open Data and CKAN. “CKAN is a tool for making open data websites, It helps you manage and publish collections of data”. He also explain the future plans of Open Knowledge Nepal and shows different example website, which was made by using CKAN tools.

Host of an event called Mr. Nirab Pudasaini from Open Street Map (OSM) Nepal after Nikesh Balami presentation. Mr. Pudasaini define what is Open Street Map (OSM) at first and also define how student, company, researcher etc. can use OSM for their project. He explain how Kathmandu Living Labs (KLL) is supporting Open Street Map (OSM) Nepal and he specially thanks student because most of the student where helping them for mapping. He shows his interest of taking Open Street Map (OSM) Nepal outside of Kathmandu valley.

Event was running is the cool way but everyone get shocked suddenly when the host called team of PHP Developer Nepal because most of the participant was unknown about the group. The team started their presentation by defining how PHP language is helping to keep web secure. They also gave a short demo on how we can enjoy and utilized all software if it was made in web.

Now, the turn was of Mozilla Nepal and representative of Mozilla, Mr. Surit Aryal was there for the presentation. He gave a presentation on the topic “Moz Stumbler” and “Mozilla Location Services”. He introduced what kinds of project it is and also make clear how public can get benefits from it.

Again, after the presentation of Mozilla Nepal, Mr. Sakin Shrestha representative of WordPress Nepal was called on the stage for the presentation. He shares how WordPress Nepal is getting global recognition and also discuss a little bit about Wordcamp Nepal. He says that number of WordPress users in Nepal is increasing and suggest participant to use WordPress CMS which is free and secure.

Turning and interesting point of the event came because it was a time of Ruby Developer Nepal presentation. Bunch of team was there wearing “I Love Ruby” t-shirt. The team gave an introductory presentation about what does Ruby Developer Nepal do, what kinds of programming language is Ruby, what are its important etc. Everyone inside the hall was listening their presentation because the way they present was very unique. They suggested different link for the visit.

After, Ruby presentation host of an event called Mr. Bhupal Sapkota from Google Developer Group (GDG) Kathmandu. Mr. Sapkota defines what kinds of event does GDG organized and how to join GDG group. He also called his teammates Mr. Saroj Dhakal on the stage again to give presentation about Google Business Group (GBG) Nepal. He shares GBG journey, How GBG was started and what kinds of platform is it.

Final presentation of event was about Open Hardware and Mr. Dipesh Kharel from Robotic Association of Nepal (RAN) was called on the stage to give a short talk on it. He first defines how robotic can help us, and also make clear why Robotic Association of Nepali (RAN) represent Open Hardware. He said that in Nepal it was really difficult to work on hardware but nowadays the people working on Open Hardware is increasing.

With that last presentation on Open Hardware both the host Mr. Rajan Kandel and Ms. Shristi Baral handover the MIC in the hand of President of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Nepal community, Mr. Subir B. Pradhanang and says thanks to all participant for joining the event. Then Mr. Pradhanang introduced the Software Freedom Day 2014 organizing team (Only new faces) and thanks them for organizing such an wonderful event.

Then again he also handover the MIC to Mr. Hempla Shrestha for the Panel Discussion and Open Discussion. During the panel discussion everyone changes their sitting arrangement and made one big circle by using chairs. Everyone introduced themselves one by one at first round of the discussion. In the second round of the panel discussion community were asked to shared their view, What kinds of problem are they facing inside the community, what are their future planning etc.
At the last round of the Discussion Session, participant were asked to come up with new ideas, which they want to work in the coming future and must say that round was brilliant. Six participant present their ideas and other interested participant who like that ideas joins them. Hope they will be working till the last on the same ideas in the coming future.

Event was ended and everyone moved for the lunch.
#SFD2014

Waiting for the new French Digital law

According to the last UN Survey on E-Government published this year, France proves to be at the top of the list of the countries embracing a high level of e-government development, reaching the 1st rank in Europe and the 4th worldwide. The study praises particularly the good integration of e-services through the online platform service-public initiated in 2005 which enables citizens, professionals and associations the access to administrative information (on their duties and legal texts among others), simplifies procedures and provides a large civil service directory. Not to forget Legifrance and vie-publique which both document legal and current affairs online. Let’s just say that efforts towards a transparent public administration have been the leitmotiv behind these initiatives.

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If we look at the Open Data side, we come to data.gouv.fr, the national Open Data platform launched in December 2011 which features nowadays its second version, this time developed with CKAN and without any fee so that the data gets indeed re-used. Those fees were one of the blackheads listed on the OKFN Index in 2013 which ranked France at the 16th position among 70 countries from all continents. Among the negative points are following the lack of relevant data like government spending or budget and the too low resolution of maps from the National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information. Thus, if a national Open Data strategy has been embraced since 2011, there is still lots to be done. Above all a law (currently being drafted) is needed to push local and regional administrations to liberate their data on an open way, because the situation is strongly disparate.

Bildschirmfoto vom 2014-09-20 17:08:32Actually, the French OD movement took root at the local level. It started in the Western region of France, Brittany, where the city of Brest decided in March 2010 to release its geographical data and in Rennes, the main town, which launched at the same time an OD site dedicated to transport data and a couple of months later the first OD platform in France, multi-sectoral and containing various web and mobile apps besides the datasets. A similar site in Nantes then regional initiatives in Loire-Atlantique and Saône-et-Loire followed during autumn 2011. Today, the map of the local and regional OD movement in France made by LiberTIC shows the commitment of administrations at different levels (regions, cities and even villages as the one of Brocas with OpérationLibre) in different parts of the country and the creation of civil society groups too.

According to the current draft of the law on decentralization imposing French towns to release their data as open, only municipalities over 3500 habitants will be affected that means 92% of them are excluded. In addition, the obligation is limited to the data already electronically available and none format or standards has been specified. Never mind, the law has to be in compliance with the implementation of the European Directive 2013/37/EU on the re-use of public sector information, named PSI Directive, which strengthens the Open principles and has to be transposed into the different national laws by each EU member country until the 18th July 2015. In France, Etalab, a special committee created in 2011 and dedicated to the governmental OD strategy, is in charge of the implementation.

The French FOI law dates back to 1978. It was modified in 2005 by an order, according to the European Directive 2003/98/EC, the first legislative measure which shaped the European framework for Open Data and was amended by the Directive of 2013 above mentioned. Preparing the implementation of this last one with the law on decentralization and another on digital technology, France appears to be very active these last months and hopefully that is a good omen for the future. Etalab organised last April a national conference on Open Data and Open Government, inviting representatives of the private sector and the civil society. The future appointment of a Chief Data Officer was announced (still to be designated) as well as the participation of the French government in the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and France will even join the OGP steering committee from 1st October. Last but not the least, the Senate published in June a report on the access to administrative documents and public data which supports the efforts made by the government since 2011 to release public data to the public domain but underlines that the results so far aren’t up to the actual challenges and don’t fulfil neither what has been expected by the civil society. Too often, the data is not complete or available in an unfriendly format, its quality varies depending on the administration, updates and meta-data are missing, revealing the lack of resources and reluctance to agree with the Open Data action. The report ends with 16 recommendations like the use of visualisations to make the data more comprehensible for the users which should be taken into consideration in the preparation of the both upcoming laws.

India Open Data Census

The India City Open Data Census is an ongoing, crowd-sourced measure of the current availability of the municipal datasets across India. It is run by Open Knowledge India and was conceptualized on the last Open Data Day (February 22, 2014). Any community member can contribute to the assessment of these datasets in their municipality at any time. Census content is peer-reviewed periodically by a volunteer team called the Open Data Census Librarians, within the Indian chapter of Open Knowledge.

Presently, the census has been conducted for 7 major cities — New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad. We have presently the following aspects to rate their openness: Real-Time Transit, Annual Budget, Expenditure, Election Results, Air Quality, Transport Timetables, Public Facilities, Crime Statistics, Procurement Contracts, Food Safety Inspections, Traffic Accidents, Building Permits, Service Requests, Business Permits and Business Listings. Scores are given, taking into account a number of parameters that relate to different levels of openness. A few of the basic questions that are asked, while rating a given dataset, are: Does the data exist? Is it available in bulk? Is is machine-readable? It is openly licensed? Is it publicly available? Is it online? Is the data provided on a timely and up to date basis? etc.

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The total number of existing datasets is 105. However, none of these is completely open and the percentage of open datasets found is zero therefore. What this means is that our governments have a lot of work to do and a lot of improvement is to be made to realize the potential of Open Governance in India. In many cities, like Kolkata, Delhi and Bangalore and Mumbai, many of the existing datasets can be made open simply by presenting them in a machine-readable format. In other cities, the governments need to work harder, as the existing datasets for these cities lag behind on various parameters. In fact, many of the datasets do not even exist!

The Central Government of India and the Regional State Governments have overcome this issue mostly. Although, previously all datasets existed either as PDF or XLS formats, much of them are now in more machine friendly formats. However, the local governments have a long way to go, before we can have this sort of effect at the local level too. Transforming the existing datasets into machine-readable formats is the most important challenge that municipal governments face.

A much graver problem is that some of the cities’ datasets are outdated. This is another aspect that we need to focus a lot of our attention to. Further, we failed to find any data on a major head like Food Safety Inspections in any of the cities that we studied. As the census moves along further, we hope that issues like this get addressed with proper attention. Progress has been made already as we are working with governments at various levels to make the data open. One other field that needs our special attention is the visualization of data. Opening up data is one thing and making it meaningful to the general public is quite another. To that effect, we have initiated a Visualized Data platform. Presently, most of the visualizations that we have done relate to national, regional or state levels. In the coming days, we intend to include more and more visualizations related to the datasets from the local governments too.