Open Data progress - met with dept. of Sericulture

So after 2 months of pause - we have been struggling to work meeting dates with some govt depts we have spoken with - we kicked this off with a meeting with Manivanan, who now heads dept of Sericulture.

Sree and I went over last week to his office, took a dump of general status of egovernance in Karnataka's silk production (aka sericulture) industry. Don't think there is much data to just take and start publishing right away. And more over, we need to find some purpose for the data we will capture and publish. In this case, collecting data to provide a regular view on how much silk is likely to get produced (supply at from the cocoon mandis), and matching that with demand (yarn market)could be a good application to target for all the data exercise we may do.

But looks like we will have to help sericulture department with some simple IT setups first. Have lots of ideas, and learned a lot about how the whole process - silk production to cocoons trading (mandi), to yarn trading (markets at Varanasi, Kanchipuam, more).

Sree and I plan to go to some mandis next to get some hands-on view, and reality check on what IT help and support does Karnataka Sericulture need to better itself. Karnataka used to produce 70% of silk in India not so long ago, apparently down to 47% now. And there is this emerging trend of yarn markets importing silk from China (competition!). Using technology to capture data to in turn improve supply forecasting and patterns could be a help, so it seemed to us.

So all in all, we are on an interesting project here. Real use of information technology in agriculture-like domain. Join in if this sounds exciting.