Hello!
I'm Nikesh Balami, a civic entrepreneur, open data advocate and tech researcher
Get in touch nikeshbalami@gmail.com
Nikesh is a civic entrepreneur, open data advocate, and tech researcher. He serves as the co-founder and CEO of Open Knowledge Nepal, a non-profit civic tech organization comprising openness enthusiasts. Simultaneously, he oversees the international open data network at Open Knowledge Foundation. Nikesh strongly supports open-source software and aligns with the vision of Open Knowledge to empower citizens in utilizing technology and open data. His interests include engaging in coffee chats, tweeting, participating in hackathons, blogging, traveling, and promoting open data.
In addition to his role at Open Knowledge Nepal, Nikesh actively contributes to the Open Data Charter as a Board Member, the Nepal-US Alumni Network (NUSAN) as a Secretary, and Youth IGF Nepal as a Founding Member. Nikesh also played a pioneering role in establishing Artificial Intelligence for Development, the FOSS Nepal community, and Code for Nepal. In his daily work routine, Nikesh coordinates various projects related to tech and data, writes research and reports, scrapes and harvests government data, and occasionally engages in coding. His extensive experience includes collaboration with private, nonprofit, and government organizations.
Nikesh is a Shuttleworth Flash Grantee 2016, a U.S. Embassy Youth Council member 2017/18, an OpenMRS Community Management Fellow 2022, and a Datasphere Fellow 2023/2024.
Open Data Nepal is a civil society initiative to make Nepal’s data accessible online perpetually. The portal allows users to publish, explore, download and use data to make their own visualisations, apps and services without any restriction.
Open Data Awareness Program aims to raise awareness about the concept and usage of open data to Nepal’s digital natives (university students from different academic backgrounds), who are the potential future decision-makers in government, civil society, and the private sector.
The LG Data fellowship aims to assist municipal bodies in getting the data digitized and better used for decision-making. It offers the opportunity to work closely with various personnel in municipalities and other stakeholders.
A collaborative project of Open Knowledge Nepal and Code for Nepal, AskNepal helps access information about local government, central government, parliament, state-funded schools, universities, hospitals and other public authorities.
Local Boundaries brings the detailed geodata of administrative units or maps of all administrative boundary defined by Nepal Government, in open and reusable format, free of cost. The local boundaries are available in two formats (TopoJSON and GeoJSON) and can be easily reused to map local authority data to OpenStreetMap, Google Map, Leaflet or MapBox interactively.
Translation version of international Open Data Handbook which help Government policy makers, leaders and common citizens to understand about Data in their Native language easily and CSO can take their awareness program in next level by using the resources.
NepalMap is a web app that puts data about Nepal at your fingertips. NepalMap helps users to find and understand data on Nepal easily, and will be useful to anyone who seeks to learn more about Nepal via data.
Hack for Nepal initiative brings different kinds of a global hackathon in Nepal. It is collaboratively hosted by Open Knowledge Nepal and Code for Nepal.