Bottom-up integration of data-aware communities: Some initial work in Kapgari village community

Integration of grassroots community level data into national planning and development process can improve its efficiency and effectiveness. It will provide timely and continuous data to evaluate investment efforts. It can also foster participatory activities in such a community. We present the idea of a data-aware community (DAC) that collects and analyses local socio-economic data and generate useful evaluation data. A DAC is mostly self-sufficient and is aware of its local condition and environment. In this paper we present some initial work that we have carried out to build a DAC. We describe how DACs can be integrated into available information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure to build a bottom-up information flow for planning and development.