Hello!
I'm Nikesh Balami, a civic entrepreneur, open data advocate and technology researcher
Get in touch nikeshbalami@gmail.com
Nikesh Balami is a civic entrepreneur, open data advocate, and technology researcher. He is the Co-founder and CEO of Open Knowledge Nepal, a non-profit civic technology 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 in their use of technology and open data. He enjoys coffee chats, 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, a Climate Action Champions Network (CACN) Cohort member for 2023/24, a Datasphere Fellow for 2023/24, and an International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) alumnus in 2026.
In addition to his work at Open Knowledge Nepal, Nikesh is actively engaged with several other organizations. He serves as the General Secretary of the Nepal-U.S. Alumni Network (NUSAN) and as a Board Member of the Open Data Charter. Nikesh has also contributed significantly as the International Open Data Lead at the Open Knowledge Foundation, a Board Member and Treasurer of Open Internet Nepal, and as a Program Coordinator at Code for Nepal. His daily responsibilities include coordinating diverse technology 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 across private, non-profit, and government organizations.
IDMS is a comprehensive and interoperable digital platform meticulously designed to facilitate seamless inter-governmental data sharing and the efficient dissemination of valuable data in the public domain, adhering to the FAIR principles.
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.
Women in Data Steering Committee work together to identify possible existing problems targeted around women and the scope of area in today's society. Alongside this identification, the committee will uphold itself as a platform to solve these problems.
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.
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.