The Fifth Elephant 2012

You’ll understand what kind of data you can get from the government and how you can use this data, challenges faced when asking for information, with the data you receive.

Outline

To explain:

• What kind of data can you get from the government via RTI
• What this data can be used for
• How to get government data using RTI
• Issues faced when asking government organizations for RTI. Examples and case studies
• Issues with Data received via RTI
• To discuss ideas for making government data public

Requirements

Projector and a laptop

Speaker bio

Nikhil Pahwa is the founder, Editor & Publisher of MediaNama, a news and analysis website chronicling the development of the digital business in India.

We’ve been using the RTI since March 2011 to get information on government policy and for extracting data which should be in the public domain. We’ve filed for data, been rejected, got incorrect data, filed appeals and published charts and data analysis.

We also launched a site called MediaNamaCharts.com, with interactive charts using Tableau, which we couldn’t sustain.