This week I am in Novi Sad for the plenary of the Assembly of European Regions. Novi Sad is the capitol of the Vojvodina, a member region, and the host for the plenary meetings of the AER.

I took part in a panel to discuss the opportunities of open data at regional level. The other panelists were my Serbian UNDP colleague Slobodan Markovic, Brigitte Lutz of the Vienna open data portal (whom I hadn’t met in years), Margreet Nieuwenhuis of the European open data portal, and Geert-Jan Waasdorp who uses open data about the European labour market commercially.

Below are the notes I used for my panel contributions:

Open data is a key building block for any policy plan. The Serbian government certainly treats it as such, judging by the PM’s message we just heard, and the same should be true for regional governments.

Open data from an organisational stand point is only sustainable if it is directly connected to primary policy processes, and not just an additional step or effort after the ‘real’ work has been done. It’s only sustainable if it means something for your own work as regional administration.

We know that open data allows people and organisations to take new actions. These by themselves or in aggregate have impact on policy domains. E.g. parents choosing schools for their children or finding housing, multimodal route planning, etc.

So if you know this effect exists, you can use it on purpose. Publish data to enable external stakeholders. You need to ask yourself: around which policy issues do you want to enable more activity? Which stakeholders do you want to enable or nudge? Which data will be helpful for that, if put into the hands of those stakeholders?

This makes open data a policy instrument. Next to funding and regulation, publishing open data for others to use is a way to influence stakeholder behaviour. By enabling them and partnering with them.
It is actually your cheapest policy instrument, as the cost of data collection is always a sunk cost as part of your public task

Positioning open data this way, as a policy instrument, requires building connections between your policy issues, external stakeholders and their issues, and the data relevant in that context.

This requires going outside and listen to stakeholders and understand the issues they want to solve, the things they care about. You need to avoid making any assumptions.

We worked with various regional governments in the Netherlands, including the two Dutch AER members Flevoland and Gelderland. With them we learned that having those outside conversations is maybe the hardest part. To create conversations between a policy domain expert, an internal data expert, and the external stakeholders. There’s often a certain apprehension to reach out like that and have an open ended conversation on equal footing. From those conversations you learn different things. That your counterparts are also professionals interested in achieving results and using the available data responsibly. That the ways in which others have shaped their routines and processes are usually invisible to you, and may be surprising to you.
In Flevoland there’s a program for large scale maintenance on bridges and water locks in the coming 4 years. One of the provincial aims was to reduce hindrance. But an open question was what constitutes hindrance to different stakeholders. Only by talking to e.g. farmers it became clear that the maintenance plans themselves were less relevant than changes in those plans: a farmer rents equipment a week before some work needs to be done on the fields. If within that week a bridge unexpectedly becomes blocked, it means he can’t reach his fields with the rented equipment and damage is done. Also relevant is exploring which channels are useful to stakeholders for data dissemination. Finding channels that are used already by stakeholders or channels that connect to those is key. You can’t assume people will use whatever special channel you may think of building.

Whether it is about bridge maintenance, archeology, nitrate deposition, better usage of Interreg subsidies, or flash flooding after rain fall, talking about open data in terms of innovation and job creation is hollow and meaningless if it is not connected to one of those real issues. Only real issues motivate action.

Complex issues rarely have simple solutions. That is true for mobility, energy transition, demographic pressure on public services, emission reduction, and everything else regional governments are dealing with. None of this can be fixed by an administration on its own. So you benefit from enabling others to do their part. This includes local governments as stakeholder group. Your own public sector data is one of the easiest available enables in your arsenal.

Today a tweet from the Serbian office of the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection thanked me and colleagues for promoting open data. As a result the Commissioner’s Office has launched an open data site today, on the data subdomain of their regular website, data.poverenik.rs. This is very good news, and a welcome consequence of the open data readiness assessment I did with the World Bank and the UNDP last year. In June I spoke with the Commissioner about their work, and his deputy already took an active role last December at the conference where we presented the results of the assessment.

In a press release (Serbian only), the Commissioner’s Office states that as further encouragement to the Serbian public administration, the Commissioner is opening up data concerning their own work. Thirteen data sets have been published, one of which I think is very important: the list of public institutions that fall under the freedom of information and data protection frameworks (over 11.000!). Other data published concerns the complaints about information requests and their status the office received, as well as complaints and requests concerning data protection and privacy.

With the help of civil society organisation Edukacioni Centar (whom I had the pleasure of meeting as well) the data comes with some visualizations as well, to improve the understanding of what data is now available. One allows navigating through the network of over eleven thousand institutions that fall within the scope of the Commissioner’s Office, another the status and subject of the various complaints received.

Serbian institutions(Screenshot of over 11.000 public institutions)

Steps like these I find important, where institutions such as the Information Commissioner, or here in the Netherlands the Supreme Audit Institution, lead by example. By doing that they underline the importance of transparency also to the functioning of their own institutions.

Last June I spent time in Serbia doing an open data readiness assessment for the World Bank. Early this month I returned to present the findings, and to mentor a number of teams at the first Serbian open data hackathon. The report I wrote is now also available online through the UNDP website.

odrareportthe printed ODRA report

The UNDP organized a conference to present the outcome of the readiness assessment and discuss next steps with stakeholders. At the conference I presented my findings to the Minister for Public Administration and Local Self Government (MPALSG), and a printed version was made available to all present.

ministerme conf1
(l) the minister (center, me left of her) on open data (photo Ministry PALSG), (r) discussing presented app datacentar.io (photo Hakaton.rs)

At the conference the 11 teams that created open data applications at the hackathon the weekend before, called Hakaton.rs, were also presented. The hackathon took place in the recently opened StartIT Centar, a coworking space (which got funded through kickstarter). I had the pleasure to be a mentor to the teams (together with Georges and Brett from Open Data Kosovo), to channel my experience with open data communities around Europe and open data app-building in the past 8 years. The quality of the results was I think impressive, and it was the first hackathon where I saw people trying to incorporate deep-learning tech. I aim to post separately on the different applications built.

mentorMentoring during the hackathon, with Milos and Nemanja. (photo Hakton.rs)

That the hackathon was about open data was possible because five public sector institutions (Ministry for Interior, Ministry of Education, Agency for Environmental Protection, Agency for Medicines and Medical Devices, and the Public Procurement Office) have been working constructively to publish data after our first visit in June. In the coming months I hope to return to Belgrade to provide further implementation support.

The report is also embedded below:

Serbia Open Data Readiness Assessment