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 is the co-founder and CEO of Open Knowledge Nepal, a non-profit civic tech organization comprised of openness aficionados. Alongside, he also manages the international open data network at Open Knowledge Foundation. 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, travelling and open data. Nikesh is a Shuttleworth Flash Grantee 2016 and U.S. Embassy Youth Council member 2017/18.
In parallel with his activities at Open Knowledge Nepal, he is also engaged with Artificial Intelligence for Development as a founding member and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Nepal community as an executive member and Youth IGF Nepal as a founding member. Previously, Nikesh also worked with Code for Nepal as a program coordinator. In his daily work schedule, he coordinates diverse projects related to tech & data, writes research & report, scrapes & harvest government data and sometimes codes. He has a long experience of working with private, nonprofit and government organizations.
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 fellowship aims to increase the number of women leaders in the field of open data in Nepal & use the existing expertise of different organizations to provide a good exposure to women and equip them with valuable work experience, confidence and skills that will help them to better understand the data ecosystem and potential opportunities.
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.