State of Community Contributed Open Data in India

https://datameet.org

DataMeet started as an email group and community to support open Open Data enthusiasts in India. It's been a decade now. Though governments and private institutions have woken up-to-the the fact that Open Data is as important as Open Standards and Open Source, their contribution has not been significant. It's still left to the individuals and communities like DataMeet, OSM, and WikiData to fill the gaps.

We will review some milestone community contributions to open data in the last few years (COVID19 data, O2 deaths, Maps), etc.

We also look at what the future collaborations between community, government, and the private sector could look like.

The goal of this talk is to offer a starting point for those who want to experiment with hardware - using free software and self-hosted services.

Why play with hardware?

What sort of play is (easily) possible?

Is it costly / tough to get access to hackable hardware?

Other challenges in hardware hacking and experimentation

What sort of hardware is there to play with?

Building hardware like a sysadmin!

(libre) Software backends and (self-hosted) services that hardware can talk to and rely on

The community around hackable hardware

Licenses for hardware designs and the software which runs on them

This talk shares my experience of past 10 years in solving network problems for large multi-location enterprises in India by building Network Equipment and Services exclusively with Free Software and Liberated Hardware.

The problem / requirement areas being:

https://libreplanet.org/2019/speakers/#sharma

In the talk we will be mostly sharing stories from our experiences while connecting the unconnected in remote rural India - especially about our ongoing efforts in building a community owned network in few adivasi villages in Odisha.

FOSS aspects of our talk:

About Us

COWDeNet – Community Owned Decentralized Networks. COWDe, phonetically similar to Kaudi, which is a traditional quilt made by stitching together smaller pieces of used fabrics. Through COWDeNet, we envision a coming together of various community networks that we are involved with, to form a larger fabric of internet, or dWeb.

Our WIP (Work In Progress) website - https://cowde.net/