It has been almost a year and 852 datasets and counting.  Data Portal India (http://data.gov.in), an Indian Government Open data initiative has come a long way, it all started with GOI announcing the NDSAP (http://data.gov.in/sites/default/files/NDSAP.pdf) and National Informatics Centre, Department of Electronics & Information Technology (http://www.nic.in) being chosen as nodal organization to implement the project.

As Community Engagement is one of the key features of the Data Portal India, we have been exploring avenues to connect with masses to boost the Open Government Data initiative. Recently, the 12th Plan Hackathon (http://data.gov.in/hackathon) was organized, which witnessed a good response from the community across the county with respect to development of applications, visualizations, info-graphics, etc. This has motivated us to organize more of such events; hence, we have been interacting with our various stakeholders.

Our Latest Endeavour

Now in association with Institute of Informatics & Communication (IIC), University of Delhi (http://www.iic.ac.in/web/), we have organized a unique event, "In Pursuit of an Idea" to encourage creative collaboration on Open Government Data for innovation.  Students from Delhi University of Delhi and professionals from the diverse fields will develop apps, visualizations, info-graphics and data-sanitation based on the ‘New Ideas’ given by citizens at large.

The event was launched on 24th May 2013. Senior officials from DGFT (http://dgft.gov.in), NIC and the University apart from civil society, developer community and academia participated in the ceremony. 

The event will spread over 60 days and will be executed in two phases. The phase one would be for idea generation and phase two would be to build solutions around the shortlisted ideas. The students along with experienced mentors from across the world in developer communities will be working on various sectors including but not limited to Trade, Energy, Agriculture, Drinking Water & Sanitation, Education & Skill Development, Health & Family Welfare and an Open category relevant to the emerging needs of the country. 

The final outcome as we all are expecting would be in the forms of Visualizations, Mobile Apps, and Web Apps etc. These final products could be showcased on the data portal (http://data.gov.in/community/idea-collaboration). All materials, code and data generated will be in public domain under creative commons (http://creativecommons.org/) license so that it may be reused, remixed and further enhanced. 

During development phase of the projects, young minds will be challenged and ignited with an innovative framework to collaborate with different stakeholders of the society to work on pressing needs of the country. And, they would come out with innovative solutions for public good. We have great hopes that this endeavour will forge a collaborative environment between Government, Students and Citizens at large to address real world problems with Open Data innovations. 

We want to invite our readers to come forward and contribute to the idea corpus through the event home page http://data.gov.in/community/idea-collaboration. 

Share your valuable feedback on  the event page on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/events/55876691747990. You can also socialize with us on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/dataportalindia and on Facebook at http://www.facebook/dataportalofindia.