Open Tech Community’s First Meetup of 2083 BS: Here’s What Happened

May 1, 2026 · Google Meet · 11:00 AM — 2:00 PM

Every year has to start somewhere. For the Open Tech Community, it started with a Google Meet call on May 1, 2026, from 11 AM to 2 PM, and about three hours of the most genuinely energising conversation the Kathmandu Chapter has had in a while.

This was the first event of the 2083 BS series, a free, online gathering designed not to impress anyone with heavy technical content, but to do something rarer and more valuable: get the community in the same room, share what’s coming, and invite people into the journey early.

No polished keynotes. No dense slide decks. Just an open space to talk about where we’re headed.

Here’s what that looked like.

What This Meetup Was Actually About?

The 2083 BS series is OTC’s commitment to showing up for the community every month, consistently, across the year. This first session set the tone for everything that follows.

The Kathmandu Chapter used the time to lay out the year’s roadmap, covering the direction around Open Data, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), OpenStreetMap, and broader local tech ecosystem development. It wasn’t a formal presentation so much as an open conversation, giving people a chance to understand the scope of what’s being built and where they might want to plug in.

The framing was deliberate: get people involved early, before the plans are set in stone, rather than announcing things after the fact.

How the Day Unfolded

The meetup ran as a tight, well-paced three hours across these sessions:

• Event kick-off by the host
• Guest speech and Vision 2083 introduction by two speakers
• Icebreaker session with attendees
• Expert technical talks by three speakers, plus a wildcard speaker
• Vision 2083 discussion and break
• Panel discussion with experts
• Closing remarks and OTC membership card reveal

Three hours. A lot was covered. It didn’t feel rushed.

The Mix of People in the Room

The attendees reflected exactly the kind of community OTC is trying to build: GIS and geomatics students, open-source contributors, GESAN representatives, and citizen science volunteers, all in the same call because they share a belief that technology should serve people, not just impress them.

The Thread Running Through Everything

Whether it was the technical talks, the panel, or the side conversations, one idea kept coming back:

Civic tech is not only about tools. It’s about people, participation, and trust.

When communities can actually see data that reflects their lived reality, where the litter accumulates, where services are missing, what the local environment actually looks like, something shifts. People stop waiting for someone else to fix things. They start asking better questions, pushing for accountability, and building solutions together.

That’s the promise of open data. And in Nepal’s urban context, it’s a case that doesn’t need much arguing.

Guest Speaker: Bhawak Pokhrel on Civic Tech

Bhawak Pokhrel, Mobile Engineering Lead at Baato, the team building Nepal’s own localized mapping and navigation infrastructure.

He explained that open data serves as the essential raw material for civic tech, providing the accessible government information needed to build tools that solve public problems. By releasing data on budgets, transit, and infrastructure, it empowers developers to create applications that improve service delivery and ensure government accountability through transparency. Ultimately, open data transforms the government into a platform, enabling citizens and businesses to collaborate on more efficient and informed communities.

Then he introduced the crowd to OpenLitterMap.

The concept is straightforward: photograph litter, tag it by type and brand, contribute the data to an open global map. To illustrate the impact, Bhawak walked the audience through a practical scenario: imagine walking down a street in your neighborhood and spotting a pile of plastic bottles. Instead of ignoring it, you open the app, snap a photo, and tag the items like identifying them not just as ‘plastic,’ but by the specific brand on the label. This simple action creates a ‘brand audit,’ transforming a random piece of trash into verifiable data that can be used to hold corporations accountable and provide city planners with a heat map of pollution hotspots.

It’s citizen science framed as a game, and it works. The platform has been used in over 110 countries and cited in peer-reviewed research. More importantly for this audience, it’s a working example of how everyday people can generate meaningful geographic data without needing institutional backing or technical training.

For a city like Kathmandu, where waste management is a daily, visible frustration, a tool like this isn’t just interesting. It’s directly applicable.

Website: openlittermap.com** GitHub: **github.com/openlittermap

Arjun Gautam on Vision 2083

Arjun Gautam, OTC’s organiser, stepped back from the project level to talk about direction. His session covered open data, the power of community, and what the Kathmandu Chapter is working toward by 2083 BS and beyond.

What struck people wasn’t the ambition of the vision (though it is ambitious). It was the insistence that none of it happens without communities actually working together. Arjun announced that OTC will hold events every month this year, and made the case that the real infrastructure Nepal’s tech ecosystem needs right now isn’t more individual talent. It’s communities that work together.

Voices from Across the Country

Three community leaders brought perspectives from outside Kathmandu, which mattered given that the 2083 BS series is about building something national, not just local.

Sameer Poudel (GESAN) highlighted the association’s ongoing work bridging academic GIS knowledge with real-world practice, and introduced Geo-World Magazine, their annual publication covering local remote sensing and geospatial applications.

Sanchit Pandey, President of CSITABMC in Butwal, talked about the effort to bring the scattered tech communities of Rupandehi together under one identity: the Lumbini Tech Community. It’s the kind of unification work that’s unglamorous and necessary.

Jyoti Pokhrel, Joint Secretary of the CSIT Association of Nepal-Pokhara, gave a glimpse of what’s coming in Pokhara with events the community there has been building toward. Watch that space.

The Icebreaker: One Word

Using Mentimeter, attendees were asked what single word came to mind when they heard “Open Tech Community.” The word cloud that appeared was one of those small, unexpectedly resonant moments: innovation, collaboration, openness, hope, community. It’s easy to be cynical about word clouds. This one felt earned.

Neerajan Subedi on Collaboration

Neerajan Subedi from BOSC (Birendra Open Source Community) in Chitwan made the case that Nepal’s open-source community is enthusiastic but fragmented, and that the missing ingredient isn’t more enthusiasm. It’s intentional communication between communities. His message, delivered with genuine warmth, was a call to stop operating in parallel and start building together.

The Panel: Depth Over Width

Hosted by Sunil Pandey, the panel brought together three people who have each found their own answer to staying relevant in a rapidly shifting industry:

• Prashant Adhikari, Project Lead at AICN and Advisor at CFC Pokhara
• Pawan Kumar Kandel, OTC Member and Senior Developer at Ambition Guru
• Sandip Basnet, OTC Member working across AI, open-source, and entrepreneurship

Prashant talked candidly about the AI hype cycle in Nepal, separating what’s real from what’s noise. Pawan described himself as “old school” with no apology, someone who has stayed deliberately less reliant on AI and found it a competitive advantage. Sandip talked through how he’s built a sustainable business in the current scenario.

The conversation was honest in a way that panels often aren’t. And the advice they landed on together was worth the whole session:

Dig deeper, not wider.

Master your current stack before chasing the next one. In a year where everyone is being told to learn everything, it was a useful counter-argument.

Wheel of Spin

The “Wheel of Spin” activity produced three happy winners:

1. Gaurav Pandey

2. Sampada Karki

3. Arin Muni Bajracharya

In a surprise announcement during the session, the community revealed that it is soon launching its own membership card. Adding to the excitement, the winners will get the first chance to access unique cards with exclusive features. Prizes can be claimed via the OTC Facebook Page.

The 10,000 Packages Announcement The most discussed announcement of the day: OTC is launching an initiative to develop 10,000 open-source packages built for local context.

The thinking behind it is direct. Developers in Nepal repeatedly work around libraries and tools designed for other countries’ languages, administrative structures, and currencies. That workaround tax adds up. This initiative is an attempt to build a shared local foundation so that future civic tech projects don’t have to start from scratch. The initiative will:

• Build reusable components that address real local problems
• Support localisation across language, currency, and administrative units
• Invite contributions from universities, student clubs, and civic groups
• Create a shared toolbox that future civic tech projects can draw from

If you have ideas for packages or want to lead a contribution theme, reach out on Facebook.

The Membership Card Reveal

The session closed with something nobody quite expected: the reveal of the OTC membership card. It’s a small thing on paper, but it landed as a symbol of something the community has been building toward quietly, a sense of belonging to something with a name, a direction, and a plan. More details on membership are coming soon.

What to Do Next?

If this recap made you want to do something, here are three concrete starting points. Map your neighbourhood. Head to openlittermap.com, photograph some litter near where you live, and contribute to a global open dataset. It takes minutes. Read local work. GESAN’s Geo-World Magazine is worth your time if you have any interest in how GIS and remote sensing are being applied right here in Nepal. Stay connected. Follow OTC on Facebook for updates on next month’s event. The 2083 BS series is just getting started.

One map, one dataset, one conversation at a time.