Open Data Meetup at Lagos

Open Data Day Lagos Recap

Introduction

Open Data Day was on the 3rd of March and we were excited to host the Nigerian version of the meetup. For this meetup, we decided to place a focus on the tools open data practitioners use for their projects and startups
As a result, speakers at the event spoke about tools they use and project they have worked on.

The event took place at the (MEST Incubator in Lagos)[meltwater.org] and we the participants were developers, data scientists, students, founders and industry leaders.

The event took off with Innocent the co-founder of Oncenout and Ubenwa speaking about how he uses machine learning algorithms in both of his startups.

You can follow the link to his presentation here.
You can also graph the slide on GitHub gist.

The second speaker is Mr. Lamina Olanrewaju (General Manager, IT Infrastructure, MTN Nigeria). He spoke about the data challenges we have in Nigeria and how public data is not being utilized.

Our female speaker was the humble Abisola Oni (Tableau Advocate - Tableau). She took a quick intro course on how data practitioners can use Tableau for their data presentation. She explained a bit about Data Visualization and data visualization techniques.

There was presentation from the guys at Internet Society presented by Akinbo Adebunmi (PRO- Internet Society Nigeria Chapter). He talked about Internet Society as an organisation that enables Open Data.

Akinbo left

Andela was also present at the event with a presentation from one of her fellow, Mr Akande Imisioluwa (Software Developer- Andela) on Building an Insights Driven Culture with Data Literacy. His presentation is shared here.

The last presenter was Mayowa (Country Manager - BeepTool) who presented on Open Data and you.

Participants asked a few questions ranging from how does the telecommunication companies provide data to the Nigerian government to help curb crime and build a crime prevention system, to how to be a data scientist, and others questions were about tricks in Tableau, how to join the data community. The event was spot on for the participants.
I few participants have this to say about the event.

Plan for next meetup

• Hackathon session
• Increase involvement of private companies
• Build the community knowledge level through sharing of tutorial repositories and short learning webinars and blog post.

Gratitude

Participants at the event expressed their gratitude to Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology and our different supporters.

The group website is on here. And the group has a WhatsApp group where members share information and ideas.