Hello!

I'm Nikesh Balami, a civic entrepreneur, open data advocate and tech researcher

Get in touch nikeshbalami@gmail.com

About

Nikesh Balami is a civic entrepreneur, open data advocate, and tech researcher. He is the co-founder and CEO of Open Knowledge Nepal, a non-profit civic tech organization working to create a fair, sustainable, and open future by advancing open knowledge as a design principle beyond data. With extensive experience in business development, project management, and capacity building, Nikesh has been instrumental in promoting data-driven decision-making across various sectors.

He is a strong supporter of open-source software and believes in the vision of Open Knowledge to empower citizens regarding technology usage and open data. He loves coffee chat, tweeting, hackathons, blogging, traveling, and open data. Nikesh has received numerous accolades, including being named a Shuttleworth Flash Grantee in 2016, a member of the U.S. Embassy Youth Council in 2017/18, an OpenMRS Community Management Fellow in 2022, Climate Action Champions Network (CACN) Cohort for 2023/24, and a Datasphere Fellow for 2023/2024.

In addition to his work at Open Knowledge Nepal, Nikesh is actively engaged with several other organizations. He serves as the Secretary of the Nepal-US Alumni Network (NUSAN), a Board Member of the Open Data Charter, and a Founding Member of Open Internet Nepal. Nikesh has also contributed significantly as the International Open Data Lead at Open Knowledge Foundation and as a program coordinator at Code for Nepal. His daily responsibilities include coordinating diverse tech and data projects, writing research papers and reports, scraping and harvesting government data, and occasionally coding. Nikesh brings a wealth of experience from his work with private, non-profit, and government organizations.

Engagement
2014 - Present
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
Secretary
Chapter Lead and Treasurer
2022 - Present
Founding Member
2022 - Present
Board Member
International Open Data Lead
2017 - April 2021
Project Coordinator
View My Resume
Other Projects

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.