Photo: DWIT Participants of Open Data Day                         Photo Courtesy: Kundan S. Rana Open Data Day, is a big day for people around the country gathered to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analysis using open public data. Open Data Day 2015 Kathmandu is the third open data day conducted in Nepal. It was conducted at Deerwalk complex on 21^st February, 2015. The day was another cause of celebration for the students of DWIT, who won the hackathon, for having developed an application. A group of four students from DWIT, Abhishek Gupta, Sanjeev Mainali, Anil Shrestha and Sameer Shrestha created a web application, “Health and Sanitation Event Tracker”, which is a platform to share and update upcoming events regarding health and sanitation. Suppose a cleanliness event is being held in Dhobi River, then this app helps people become aware of the program. This app will particularly locate where the event is being held. This will help more people to participate in the event and make the event more successful. [caption id="attachment_4990" align="aligncenter" width="653"] Photo: Graphical Data page of Health and Sanitation Updates Tracker
Photo Courtesy: Abhishek Gupta[/caption] The app being specifically made for problem solving around the local areas but one of the members of the winning team Abhishek Gupta feels the app is being now made to show our creativity and building confidence for bigger prices. We have the willingness to pursue several such problems and solve them in future when we have more resources and connections. The team is now targeting for the main price of the upcoming International Space App challenge popularly known as the NASA hackathon. The team coded for approximately six hours with platforms such as HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap, clients such as JavaScript, AngularJS and data using JavaScript Object Notation to come up with the app. “The six hours which was given to build the app went efficiently and productively as the algorithm was well-defined and the coding was also pre-visualized,” says Sanjeev Mainali (one of the winners). Abhishek Gupta, student from the fifth semester of DWIT, came up with the idea which was followed up with a brainstorming session with theteam. Each member of the team was assigned with certain challenging tasks. Abhishek Gupta tabulated the given data, searching and locating the data to a particular place where the event was being held. Sanjeev Mainali plotted the graphical and map data. Anil Shrestha searched for such events and stored the data, he also researched for the latitude and longitude for a sample data and Sameer Shrestha dynamically plotted data into the map. The app would take such event from a registered party or organization, date of the event and details on the event and send it to the public. “The app in reality will be huge hit because it is an amazing concept. Just think about it!!,” says Sameer Shrestha. The app can also be used to see success rate of events in certain areas and target those areas. Some major challenges appeared while the app was being created. The module prepared to create an event to plot in mapping worked irregularly. Luckily the judges just went thoroughly observing the app and liked the concept. The group triumphed. However the judges requested the members of the winning team to take feedback from their opponents to get more sentiment for the app. The winners collected Rs. 15,000 minus the tax and enjoyed dinner at a nice Thakali restaurant.  Abhishek Gupta feels winning is sharing and was disappointed that only 11 students from DWIT showed up at the event. He joked, “They missed an awesome Thakali dinner that we would have shared. Better luck next time.” There were another set of students who participated in the competition. They had built an app called OHN(Open Health Nepal). Open health Nepal is a web app targeted for anyone who wants to know about the hospitals in Kathmandu. It basically provides information about the location of the hospitals (with the help of Google map), the capacity regarding the bed count. Since, the primary cause of disease is lack of education about the disease itself and the awareness needed to remain insulated from such diseases. So, this app also provides some useful information about some of the most vulnerable diseases like HIV/AIDS and Cancer. Different graphical representations show the trend of these diseases since the past decade. “It was a great experience indeed. Building something valuable is always an awesome thing to do. A win would have put a cherry on the cake, but never mind there is always a next chance. Hope to come stronger next year,” said Bimal Gaire, one of the members of OHN. OHN is built using HTML and CSS along with JavaScript and bootstrap for interactive design. The map is made by using the Google Fusion Tables. First of all, we had the data from Everest list regarding the hospitals in Kathmandu. We gathered their respective longitudes and latitudes and plotted the points on the Google map with the help of “fusion table”. The charts were animated using a library 'Chart.js'. Ashim Regmi added, “Those 6 hours were pressurizing as well as fun. I am really happy about all this. I worked with some of the best people around. There were some obstacle and we overcame those. Feels really great” Though there was only a winner, the other team also tried real hard. It is a good sign for DWIT. Hope there will be more participants in the coming years.