On the development of open data in Ukraine

Over the past two years, Ukraine has done more in open data than in the last decade. What is happening in the field of open data in Ukraine, will be discussed in this article.

The unified state portal of open data has been launched data.gov.ua

The first version of the portal was made by volunteers from Socialboost with the support of international organizations and Microsoft. To date, the portal has been transferred to the state, namely to the balance of the State Agency for E-Government. Currently, more than 5,000 data sets are available on the portal from nearly 700 managers, although there are not very many quality sets as a percentage, so work on data quality is a priority.

The open data portal of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine is launched opendata.rada.gov.ua

BP decided not to lag behind and also developed its own open data portal. The sets are organized in the following categories: organizational structure, financial information, regulatory framework, bills, plenary sessions, people's deputies.
')

Regulatory support

On April 9, 2015, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted the Law of Ukraine No. 319 “On Amendments to Certain Laws of Ukraine Concerning Access to Public Information in the form of open data” . The said Law amended the Law of Ukraine “On Access to Public Information” in order to determine the basic norms and principles for the development of open data in Ukraine, namely:

1. Public information in the form of open data is public information in a format that allows its automated processing by electronic means, free and free access to it, as well as its further use.
2. Information stewards are obliged to provide public information in the form of open data to a request, publish it and regularly update it on a single public web portal of open data and on their web sites.
3. Any person can freely copy, publish, distribute, use, including for commercial purposes, in combination with other information or by incorporating into its own product public information in the form of open data with a mandatory reference to the source of such information.

October 21, 2015 The Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine No. 835 “On approval of the Regulation on datasets to be published in the form of open data” was adopted. . The decree clearly defines the list of formats for disclosing open data depending on their type:


TXT, RTF, ODT, DOC(X), PDF ( , ), (X)HTML


RDF, XML, JSON, CSV, XLS(X), ODS, YAML


GIF, TIFF, JPG (JPEG), PNG


MPEG, MKV, AVI, FLV, MKS, MK3D


MP3, WAV, MKA

, Macromedia Flash
SWF, FLV


ZIP, 7z, Gzip, Bzip2


Also, the decree stipulates that state registries that are constantly updated should be opened using the API.

In order to ensure the effective functioning of the Unified State web portal of open data and increase the openness and transparency of the activities of executive bodies and local governments, the State Agency for E-Government in February 2016 developed a draft resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine “Some issues of public information disclosure in the form of open data ", Which is now at the discussion stage.

Assessment of Ukraine’s readiness for the development of open data

In order to determine the current state of development and the readiness of Ukraine for the development of open data, as well as planning further actions, an assessment was made of Ukraine’s readiness to develop open data according to the ODRA World Bank methodology.

The evaluation was conducted in eight areas:

1. Government liabilities;
2. Political and legal framework;
3. Institutional structure, distribution of responsibility and ability of government structures;
4. Government policies and procedures for data processing;
5. Demand for open data;
6. Public sector involvement and opportunities for open data;
7. Financing open data policy;
8. National technological infrastructure and skills.

In short, everything is good with the willingness of society to use open data, more or less the situation with the government's willingness to open data, technical infrastructure, but everything is bad in terms of funding, the industry developing products based on open data and protecting privacy. A detailed report is available by reference (there are reports in Ukrainian and English).

Open Data Development Roadmap

In order to ensure the integrated development of open data, the State Agency for E-Government has developed a Roadmap for the development of open data in Ukraine, contains 41 tasks in 5 areas:

1. increasing the availability and quality of open data;
2. development of the ability of authorities to publish open data;
3. strengthening the role of open data in the implementation of state policy;
4. regulatory support;
5. the development of demand and the ability of target audiences to use open data.

Each roadmap assignment has a specific expected result. This document was approved by the order of the Ministry of Regional Development dated 04.02.2016 No. 19. The full text is available by reference (ukr).

Open Data Charter

Now Ukraine is initiating accession to the International Charter of Open Data.

The draft Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers is located by reference (ukr).

The development of the International Charter was initiated by representatives of the governments of Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, influential international organizations in May 2015 during an international conference on open data issues in Canada.

The main objective of the International Open Data Charter is to improve and promote cooperation and coherence for the adoption and implementation of joint principles, standards and best practices of open data around the world. The objectives of the Charter are the spread of democracy, the fight against corruption and the promotion of economic growth throughout the world. The Charter defines 6 main principles and ways for the development of open data for the country.

World and Ukrainian competencies and ratings

Today, the most important are the following two ratings assessing the state of the development of open data:

1. Open Data Barometer . In this ranking, Ukraine ranks 62nd.
2. Open Data Index . In this ranking, Ukraine ranks 54th (out of 122).

Ukraine cooperates with such international organizations in the field of open data:

1. Open Data Institute . Engaged in the development of open data around the world, the formation of standards and common approaches, the development of competencies.
2. Open knowledge foundation . They are engaged in the support of public institutions for the development of open data, as well as the development of an open platform for building open data portals CKAN.
3. Open Data for Development . Engaged in supporting open data development initiatives around the world, as well as organizing international cooperation.

Professional Ukrainian organizations and initiatives

In Ukraine, an open data incubator 1991 was launched, which systematically deals with the selection of projects, their incubation and the search for investments. To date, there have already been two sets in the incubation program.

At the beginning of the year, EGAP Challenge was launched - a competition of IT projects in the field of e-democracy, the social sphere and projects in the field of open data. The joint initiative of the State E-Government Agency, the Eastern Europe Foundation within the framework of the EGAP Program, funded by the Swiss Confederation, aims not only to introduce new e-democracy tools in four regions of Ukraine (Vinnitsa, Volyn, Dnipro and Odessa regions), but to show them with Ukrainian start-ups are a new niche in which you can create high-quality projects that can directly affect local and central government. And the government, in turn, will receive a set of new tools for increasing its efficiency and transparency of interaction with taxpayers.

Priority areas are:

• creation of new tools for interaction between the authorities and society, especially in terms of providing citizens with the opportunity to directly influence management decision-making processes;
• increasing the transparency and openness of the activities of the authorities, especially in terms of the formation and execution of budgets, the provision of permits, and the like;
• creation of new high-quality services for citizens and businesses, especially in the provision of public services;
• development of projects based on open data;
• solving social problems;
• uniting and establishing effective cooperation of citizens to solve common problems;
• Smart City projects;
• sectoral projects aimed at improving the efficiency of public administration and services for citizens and businesses (e-ecology, e-medicine, e-education, etc.).

Creative weekends were held in four regions, where 15 projects were selected for two-month incubation. The contest partners were Cisco, IBM, DeNovo, Intel.

Ukraine has powerful public organizations working with open data - OPORA, Honestly, Clerical hundred, Vox Ukraine and others. The result - dozens of studies, data visualization projects, monitoring of open data sets, dozens of events throughout the country. Several projects have already been implemented in government services and smart city projects.

For example, the open data of the Ukrzaliznytsia gave an opportunity to do a large-scale study - who and where goes, which key stations, how the traffic flow and other visualizations are distributed.



Information on the station Kiev:



In addition, ID cards were legalized instead of paper passports, government purchases were transferred to a single ProZorro system, which won the World Procurement Awards 2016 in the public procurement nomination, the E-Date public monitoring portal and other services were launched.

In general, Ukraine is only at the beginning in terms of the openness of public services, the creation of institutions for monitoring the activities of deputies, officials and city services, and the digitization of public services. For the time being, these processes are fairly muddled and far from a systematic approach, but we need to start with something.

Thanks for attention!