silkboard - 6 October, 2010 | Bangalore | egovernance | governance | Others | Open Data

Give the current state of digitization, automation, and storage and access within most government departments, some of us have realized that this project requires far more bandwidth than we can afford at this point of time.

The idea is to find and design ways to regularly publish data from few government departments, and make datasets available in such ways that meaningful applications and visualization can be written on top of them. However, the project has two issues

• Most Government departments need help to digitize and automate their processes first. Save for a few exceptions, there seem to be no existing data warehouses that you can just tap into and design process and programs to publish data sets.
• Don't mis-read above statement as "govt depts do not keep and compile data". Most do. But compilation is done manually, data may be stored across several systems, there would to be multiple versions, who and who can't access may not be well defined etc. If you get in, you will not be able to overlook these other issues, and overlooking them won't be right either.
• The technical expertise required to help design datasets, and then design programmatic ways to visualize the datasets is something that we can't manage in "Praja mode" (read part time mode), at least right now.

The project is certainly open to a new group of IT-savvy,  transparency loving and analytical Prajas who think they would be able to run with the concept. My personal advise is to put this project on hold. Instead, enthusiasts can open separate projects, one per government dept you are interested in, to publish their datasets, or to help them digitize and automate.

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