The past three months have been immensely productive for us at Lakeer. Thanks to Soft Corner for developing with us our products, and to Tech4Dev for the immense support and frequent follow-ups. Here’s a quick update on what we have been up to:

Product 1- QGIS plug-in for CitySight:

1. Soft Corner has closely worked with us and developed a QGIS plug-in for us which is currently connected to our CitySight’s staging database and loads all the layers on the platform on to QGIS. The user of the plugin, with authorized credentials, can connect to CitySight’s database and look at all the available datasets on the CitySight’s platform, select the desired layers and load them on QGIS. This enables users to utilize QGIS’ functionalities in CitySight.
2. Amar and team are working on the second part of the plug-in which will allow the user to not just download layers from the database, but also push analyses results from QGIS to the CitySight platform and also specify the category and service (the hierarchical location of the dataset) for such dataset while doing so. This plugin will help us reduce the high costs of uploading individual datasets on to the server.

Product 2- City-Reporter:

1. Soft Corner and Lakeer have built the first version of our City-Reporter tool. The tool helps to report data stories for urban issues like public transport, housing, climate change, etc. City-reporter so far can:

1. Help build basic data stories on urban issues. Each story built on the platform will consist of multiple sections in the form of text, interactive map, media, embedded content, or a combination of any two of these.
2. CityReporter allows users to pull specific analyses made on CitySight to augment the data stories they are building. This helps tell a story spatially across the city.
3. The stories created can be shared on social media platforms of LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. This helps readers to share the stories with the larger citizenry.
4. The platform also allows a comments section at the end of each story, the comments in which can be later approved by the admin.

1. We had a user training session with Soft-Corner where they trained our team on working with all the features of the reporting tool.
2. The reporter tool has been deployed on the server and we are working on building more test stories on the platform.

Pradnya and the entire Soft Corner team have been immensely supportive throughout the development process and have closely interacted with us and made this progress possible.

This week is very crucial for us as Soft Corner would be handing us over the city-reporter tool. We are still working on some minor changes and testing all the features.

Click here and here for the previous two updates on our products.

Rajesvari Parasa

Program Manager

Lakeer Foundation