Introducing CodePakistan
Introducing CodePakistan, an open source platform, to use and contribute stuff that is useful to everyone. Developers are welcome to contribute to create, build and share the code, apps, data-sets and/or raw information that is helpful to all.
Why CodePakistan? Because, I have seen passionate people trying to execute their ideas to help the general public for their daily use or to recover from a disaster. In Pakistan, while we normally and literally share everything at street levels (even stuff that actually never happened), it however becomes obnoxious to share everything and literally, anything at official channels. I, myself had times when I had to rely on data and information which required so much manual work before it could be passed on for any further use. Probably, it was one of the reasons that many of us were enthusiastically attracted to Google Map Maker when it was launched back in 2008. The only reason behind all the enthusiasm was an availability of platform with easier use and contribute attributes, from which everyone would benefit and now we see that we made right assumptions.
Similarly, when I was working with @momers, @farazilu and @zarabad to make crisis data available on daily basis during Hunza Landslide disaster, we normally had to compile various kinds of data manually on daily basis and sometimes even twice a day. The official websites were and are just the collection of dumped data and information just as we probably through stuff at our computers’ desktops. The webmasters/developers (read ministers’ nephews) would not even bother to rename the files from Untitled.doc to something else. In recent years, I figured out that it wasn’t just us, unfortunately. @yasirsheikh had been facing similar issues while developing electoral systems during 2013 general elections and etcetra.
CodePakistan is an open source platform for all. I am here, calling literally everyone out there and welcoming (particularly developers) to contribute their stuff with the world from this one platform. Be it the code, apps, data, information (in any format) or even mere an infographic. The most important thing in all this is that how useful this is to everyone. Unless it is obvious, you will need to describe the purpose of contribution and its ultimate use. Contact me if you are interested in contributing!