---
redirect_from: /2013/08/kathmandu-metropolitan-spending-party/
title: Kathmandu Metropolitan Spending Party
authors:
- Prakash Neupane
---
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<span><span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">Kathmandu, city of temple, capital of naturally enriched (Mountains, lakes, Hills, River) palace Nepal. Where people believe more than 4 millions (but record shows 2.5 millions) people reside in 50.67 square km area. All the governance body(ministries, departments, commissions), legislative body(Supreme Court, Armed Court), Security Force (Nepal Army, Nepal Policy, Armed Police Force) are centralized in Kathmandu. People have to come Kathmandu for going outside from Nepal, because only one international airport (Tribhuwan International Airport) is in Kathmandu. So it is obvious, the huge budget is spent for Kathmandu.</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Open Knowledge Foundation Nepal, organized City Spending Data Party on July 19-21. The objective was to work on the budget of kathmandu metropolitan that was announced just 1 week back. The program was invitation only , so the announcement for participation was done in 12 july <a href="http://np.okfn.org/2013/07/12/city-spending-data-party-kathmandu-2013/">http://np.okfn.org/2013/07/12/city-spending-data-party-kathmandu-2013/</a> . And finally selected </span></span><span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>12 participants </span></span><span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>on the base of first come</span></span><span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>(this was for first two days while last day was public)</span></span><span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>.</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>As it was the first time event, every one worked hard, here is the summary:</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span><strong>First Day:</strong></span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">Everybody arrived on time, we discussed on what we are going to build, what could be the expected plan of three days. First task was group division, we have 4 groups</span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Data Wrangler: Kshitiz, Manish, Sanjeev Khadka, Nikesh Balami, Rajan Silwal</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Code Hackers : Everest, Bidhya, Utshav, Rajendra</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Designer: Rajesh and Ashish</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Documentation and Social Media : Sajjan and Spandan</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Data Wrangler team download the pdf file of 22<sup>nd</sup> Kathmandu Metropolitan City council budget for fiscal year 2070/71from the official website of Kathmandu Metropolitan.</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Download some tools like tabular pdf to csv and tableau </span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">Differentiate the data into two topics, Aaya(Income) and Byaya(Expenditure) of Kathmandu Metropolitan</span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">Decided to work on Byaya (Expenditure), which include:</span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Pujigat Kharcha(Capital Expenditure)</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Talab, Parisramik, Subidha Kharcha(Salary and Facilities Expenditure)</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Karyalaya Sanchalan Kharcha (Office Running Expenditure)</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Purwadhar Sudhar tatha anya bikash Kharcha (Infrastructure and Development Expenditure) </span></span>

&nbsp;

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span><strong>Second Day</strong></span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">Day 2 kicked off with data wranglers completing remaining works of day first (completed total conversion)</span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">Code hackers and designers worked on the visual par</span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">Visualizing the information from the budget of Kathmandu Metropolitan city in simple charts and spending visualizations.</span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">Designs, banners and slides for next day</span>

&nbsp;

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><strong>Third Day</strong></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Around 25 participants including Former Minister, Media, Students and others</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">We presented what we had made in last two days.</span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><a style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Verdana, sans-serif;" href="http://blog.openspending.org/wp-admin/index.php">Dashboard</a>Discussed issues and problems we had faced while working.</span>

<a href="{{ site.baseurl }}/img/blog/2013/08/okfn.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-567" src="{{ site.baseurl }}/img/blog/2013/08/okfn.jpg" alt="okfn" width="969" height="500" /></a>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span><strong>Output</strong></span></span>

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">We have written <a href="http://np.okfn.org/2013/07/24/kathmandu-metropolitan-in-city-spending-data-party/">this post</a> explaining the output. </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The output from openspending.org is at the top of the post or you can find it on <a href="http://openspending.org/kathmandu_spending_budget">OpenSpending</a>.</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span><strong>Impact</strong> <strong>and Learning </strong></span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">The event was good learning for all, The first challenge was to extract the budget information from pdf, so it took almost whole day to properly extract the data from it.</span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Second major problem was the language, the font was preeti, which means it was not in nepali unicode, the interesting thing is, Nepal's government has already address this through policy but due to the lack of proper management, it is not implemented in many place.</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Third was, lacking of technical knowledge of platform, later we studied and made it finally.</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">After doing this event, Kathmandu Metropolitan appreciate our working and suggest us to give them feedback and also invite us there to resolve those issues.</span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>After this event, different social organizations, media are willing to collaborate us for the event like this.</span></span>

&nbsp;

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><strong>Future Plan</strong></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">We are planning to continue this event in schedule(might be in every 3/3 months)</span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>We are planning to start a class to learn more technical skill with schoolofdata.org as well as a regular class with experts.</span></span>

<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>We are going to work on whole government budget soon.</span></span>

