Happy New Year 2020, YI hikers, Presentation on Open Contracting, Goodbyes

🎊🎊 Happy New Year 2020 to all of our readers and well-wishers! May 2020 bring you all that you desire 🎊🎊

With new year, new environment has come about. We said goodbyes to our old seating arrangements and have shifted to new desks. But more importantly, YI has evovled in-terms of how we are doing things around here. More on this in the coming days. 😉

Ending 2019 with a hike to Bagdwar

Last Sunday, We (13 people) as a team gathered at the budanilkantha temple near 8 AM and started our journey. Till the army base camp, we went through our respective vehicles. Checking-in into the army checkpoint buying tickets, we had entered into the Shivapuri national park and conservation area. The journey started with full enthusiasm and full of energy. After the 3 and half hour exciting hiking, we reached into the Bagdwar (our destination) and had lunch (things we had carried with us). While returning, we took the route to Nagi-Gumba (a view point of kathmandu) and then to army base camp. And after having food, finally we departure to home at 5 pm from the temple. It was more like being into nature and enjoying the company. The mountain view and mother nature beauty was worthful to spend a day into that environment. …

Secret Santa 2019, Gearing up for 2020

It is getting colder with each day. ⛄️ The heaters are on! 🔥 And if you were to visit us, you’d probably find a few people basking in the sun 😎 and working of course! Besides the cold temperature to deal with, the week has been so much fun.

To start off the blog,

Secret Santa 2019

Secret Santa came to a conclusion this week for 2019 with all happy faces. 😃It has sort of become a tradition here at YI for a few years now and it has always brought excitement to the much needed cold weather. Though none of us here celebrate Christmas, we always look forward to it each year for the gifts! 😄 This year we had a wonderful team of the organizers Anjana Rupakheti and Biju Nakarmi to thank and of course our almost mysterious santa Mani Bibek Acharya, all dressed up and distributing gifts to everyone. …

-Pramod Bhattarai, Governance Officer, Freedom Forum

Freedom Forum (FF) organized a half day event to share key findings and recommendations of two separate studies entitled ‘Mapping and Analysis of Existing Open Data Initiatives (ODI) at the Federal and Local Government level in Nepal’ and ‘Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice (KAP) Survey of Citizen-State Engagement at Local Level using Technological Interfaces’ in the capital on June 30, 2019.

The studies were undertaken by FF as part of the ‘Sustainable Use of Technology for Public Sector Accountability in Nepal (SUSASAN)’ — a project implemented in 12 local governments of Nepal with funding from Global affairs Canada (GAC). …

8 local governments of Sudurpaschim Province celebrated International Open Data Day on March 2, 2019. Out of 8, 7 local governments have celebrated the day for the first time in their district whereas Sanfebagar municipality, Achham celebrated for the second time this year after a huge celebration in 2018. The day’s celebration was specially organized by the respective local government whereas the SUSASAN district partner organizations supported for the success of the day. Different local government had their own priorities on how to celebrate the program in their local levels with the key stakeholders. …

Jayaprithvi Municipality and Masta Rural Municipality organized a celebration of the International Open Data Day 2019 facilitated by Sahara Nepal SUSASAN Project. The day was not only celebrated for name of celebration. It was rather a symbol that they are being open, providing space to engage citizen with them in decision making process and it was a great effort to make easy access of women and marginalized groups in data.

The importance of open data cannot be listed in words as it has a large scope in sustainable development, to maintain good governance through accountability. The practice of Open Data ensures the access, use and re-use of data of the public institutions which will promote citizen state engagement to maintain transparency and responsiveness. …

Insights from the Co-creation Workshop of YoungInnovations with government officials and civil society in SUSASAN Project

In July 2018, the first workshop on Innovation, Data, and Technology (SUSASAN School) took place with a tremendous amount of enthusiasm among local governments and civil society. The Local government took ownership of the tools developed in the first year of SUSASAN Project. See what happened during the workshop here.

The Co-creation of Technological Solutions

Following the July Workshop, the IT officials of the local governments were more interested in innovating technology-based solutions to the challenges to accountability in respective local governments. This is how the model of co-creation i.e. developing solutions based on the issues was established.

The following are the tools that were co-created with each district teams in the second year of…

SUSASAN has faced challenges in these one and a half years of implementation in terms of data and development of tools. Though data portals have been launched along with other tools to support the local governments but we have failed to interact with the government officials, the central beneficiaries of this project. To change that, we brought together the IT officials from the local governments, the civil society organization’s representatives and the partners of the project in a single room by organizing a learning and co-creation workshop. …

The foggy mornings and the cold winds are here in Kathmandu. Hope you all are keeping yourselves warm! Drink coffee it helps.

Today is World AIDS Day, let’s create awareness. It is very crucial to talk about it to save lives, especially in societies like ours where the disease is tabooed.

PPTIN officially Launched

Public Procurement Information Portal (beta) for Nepal is now live under ppip.gov.np. It is one of the steps taken by the Government of Nepal, especially from the Public Procurement Monitoring Office (PPMO), to have adopted Open Government Data. YI has been leading this initiative.

Yay team! Yay Government of Nepal! …