GOVERNMENT

OF THE REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA e-Government Center

Moldova Open Government Data FOR A TRANSPARENT AND ACCOUNTABLE

GOVERNMENT

Irina Tisacova, e-Government Center

Starting Point

• The Government of the Republic of Moldova is guided by its Activity Program for 2011-2014*, entitled “European Integration: Freedom, Democracy, Welfare”, which has 24 action points explicitly aimed at improving government transparency and accountability, of which:

– Enforcing the Law on Access to Information and Transparency in the Decision Making by posting open government data online;

– adopting the “Access to Open Government Data” Initiative;

* http://gov.md/doc.php?l=en&idc=445&id=3729

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Citizen participation in government decision-making process through opening up government data

Creating innovative applications and e-services for citizens through greater reuse of open data

First steps

April 15th 2011

The e-Government Center launches the open government portal and a contest to promote the development of applications

April 29th 2011 Institutionalizing the Open Data Program. Prime Minister Filat signs a directive, making Moldova one of the first 16 countries implementing an Open Government Data Initiative

May 25th 2011 Ministry of Finance publishes the entire database of public expenses in raw and in pivot table formats (the BOOST Tool)

July 15th 2011 A two-day Tech Camp Moldova was organized to both educate and facilitate brainstorming about new uses of open data in Moldova. The outcome was a set of “solutions” that could develop into deployable applications and e-services

Open Government Data Globally

• USA - http://data.gov – 390 136 data sets

• UK – http://data.gov.uk - 7 700 data sets

• Australia – http://data.gov.au – 805 data sets

• Sweden – http://opengov.se – 106 data sets

• Moldova – http://date.gov.md – 155 data sets

Open Government Data Globally

Open Data Portal v.1

Speeding up

In the first two weeks from launch, the unique governmental portal has registered:

– 67 data sets uploaded

– 5 public institutions contributing

– 1,500 unique visitors of the portal

– 300 downloads of data sets

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Where we are today, 8 months later…

– 155 datasets

– 20 public authorities opened up data

– 11 out of 16 ministries published data

– 17,273 views

– Over 20,000 downloads

Most active and committed institutions:

– Ministry of the Interior

– Ministry of Education

– Public Acquisitions Agency

– Ministry of Information Technology and Communication

– Ministry of Health

Next steps

• Updating date.gov.md to increase its functionality and improve user experience

• Launch of the Web version of BOOST

• Identifying challenges of some ministries in releasing data

• Building applications that will use open data to solve social issues

Open Data Portal v.2

Web BOOST

Bumps in the road

• Open Data is supply driven and not demand driven. Demand should drive supply

PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS: • Inefficient data collection process, which impedes simple release of government data

by various ministry • Opening up data is seen by many as a process that requires addition human and time

resources • Low quality of data • Data is often sent in Word format, in an unstructured form and with no related

metadata • Inaccurate data with different ID’s presented within the same Ministry • Miscommunication within Ministries and with their subordinate institutions • Unwillingness to release data by misattributing it to commercial secret • Impediments in releasing open government data indicate to inefficiencies within

some Ministries. The more efficient and modernized the Ministry, the easier and faster is the release of data.

CIVIL SOCIETY / NGOs: • Lack of a vision of how to utilize open data to provide solutions to social issues • Lack of visualization apps that would help the public digest the data

Are we there yet? – NO

• Legal aspects: – Adoption of the Law on PSI reuse – Publishing data under OGD license(s)

• Promotion: – Tech camps / Applications building contests – Discussion boards and community building – Motivating NGOs and citizens to use data for social change

• Sustainability and quality improvements: – Better metadata – Linked data – APIs development / publishing

• Capacity building & training – Open Data basics, linked data, semantic web

• Cooperation and partnerships – Involvement of local governments – Open Government Partnership, Open

Knowledge Foundation, Semantic Web etc.

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Thank you for your attention!

Do you have any questions?