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.

The UNDP has published the open data readiness assessment for the Krygyz Republic. From November 2014 to June 2015 I visited Kyrgyzstan three times for a week on behalf of the World Bank. In collaboration with the Kyrgyz Government and the UNDP, as well as local companies, civil society organisations and the coding community, we looked for the right starting points for open data in Kyrgyzstan, and which steps to take to get going.

The UNDP has now published the resulting report, which is embedded below. Download link here.

Open Data Readiness Assessment Kyrgyzstan, by Ton Zijlstra.

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