© 2026 Copyright Al Kags.
All rights reserved.

Archive

Open Data Day #KE is here!

I am so excited. The International Open Data day is coming up on February 22, 2014 and in Kenya, we are holding it simultaneously  in three cities - Nairobi, Kisumu and Mombasa. Simeon, the Open Institute's community manager and his team at OI have been working with ...

My 2013 challenge: find all matatu routes in Nairobi

So I have set myself a challenge before the end of this year. I would like to document all matatu routes in the greater Nairobi over the next few days - before Dec 31, 2013. Please help me achieve this. Just fill this form with ...

I am worried.

I am worried. What is worse, is that my worries are non-specific, nagging and lurking at the back of my mind constantly as I go through my day. On the face of it, I have every reason to be optimistic - we have a new ...

Lessons from KODI: Completing the Job

My friend, Alex Howard from O'Reilly Radar, asked me a question in September last year that I have wrestled with since: "What are the lessons learnt from the Kenya Open Data Initiative experience?"  I have wrestled with this question all of this time because I don't take "Lessons Learnt"questions ...

Getting Open Data to the people – An example: GotToVote!

I am really excited. Just yesterday, I was speaking at a conference organised by Development Initiatives in Nairobi, where Civil Society Oorganisations were thinking through how to work with Kenya Open Data Initiative, how they can use it and add value to it and so on. ...

Interest of Gov’t same as Interests of the people?

Blog Post #1 from the Open Africa Summit, Zanzibar I write this on the flight back to Nairobi from Zanzibar’s Melia Hotel (the subject of its very own blog post later), where I attended one day of the Open Africa Summit. The Summit, brought to one ...

Why not? Why can’t Kenya vote via SMS?

In my last post, I promised to share my musings on the Kenyan elections. I did muse a little on this subject at the NDI Conference on Technology and Transparency and in general, the faces of my audience told me that I am too simplistic ...

NDI Conference: Open Data and Elections

This past week I was invited by the National Democratic Institute team in Kenya to speak at a conference they organised in Nairobo to discuss the elections. They asked me to discuss lessons from the Kenya Open Data Initiative that might be useful in thinking ...

Kenya Open Data Initiative one year on

I have just returned to Kenya from a week-long trip to Washington DC, where I attended the International Open Government Data Conference (See the liveblog) that was co-hosted by the World Bank Group and the US Open Data Initiative, dubbed data.gov. Coming one year after the ...