Open Economic Data (GR0071)

Commitment 7: Open access to data of the Ministry of Economy and Development

Current situation
The information is now covered by Law 4305/2014 on the «Open access and re-use of documents,
information and public sector data, amendment of Law 3448/2006 (Α΄ 57), adaptation of national
legislation to the provisions of Directive 2013/37/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council,
further strengthening of the transparency, regulation of issues regarding the recruitment competition
of the National School of Public Administration and Local Government and other provisions» (Official
Gazette Α’ 237/31.10.2014), with the differentiations provided for under the Directive regarding
libraries, museums and archives, and a specific provisions regarding the protection of cultural
heritage.

Description of Commitment
A wealth of data falling within the scope of Law 4305/2014 is available to the Ministry of Economy
and Development and its supervised entities and will be made available for re-use in order to
contribute to the development and participation of citizens.

OGP Principles
Access to public information

Implementation entities, stakeholders
Implementation: Ministry of Economy and Development
Cooperation with supervised entities.

Contact details: Ministry of Economy and Development, DG of Digital Policy and e-Government

Objective
1) Integration of new datasets
2) Mobilisation of entities of the Ministry of Economy and Development for data publication.
3) Improvement of the quality of datasets
4) Open data release decisions
5) Upgrading of digital applications and provision of additional datasets
6) Datasets, applications and visualisations of data of procurement, contracts, public works and services

Key milestones - Timetable
Milestone Completion
1) Integration of new datasets
2) Mobilisation of entities of the Ministry of Economy and Development for data publication.
3) Improvement of the quality of datasets
4) Open data release decisions
5) Upgrading of digital applications and provision of additional datasets
6) Datasets, applications and visualisations of data of procurement, contracts, public works and services

7. Open access to data of the Ministry of Economy and Development

Main Objective

The published NAP mentions (p.26) the main objective for this commitment as follows:

"Description of Commitment: A wealth of data falling within the scope of Law 4305/2014 is available to the Ministry of Economy and Development and its supervised entities and will be made available for re-use in order to contribute to the development and participation of citizens."

"Objectives: 1) Integration of new datasets

2) Mobilisation of entities of the Ministry of Economy and Development for data publication

3) Improvement of the quality of datasets

4) Open data release decisions

5) Upgrading of digital applications and provision of additional datasets

6) Datasets, applications and visualisations of data of procurement, contracts, public works and services."

Milestones

The published NAP mentions (p.26-27) the milestones for this commitment as follows:

"1) Integration of new datasets

2) Mobilisation of entities of the Ministry of Economy and Development for data publication

3) Improvement of the quality of datasets

4) Open data release decisions

5) Upgrading of digital applications and provision of additional datasets

6) Datasets, applications and visualisations of data of procurement, contracts, public works and services."

Editorial Note: For the complete text of this commitment, please see Greece's action plan at https://www.opengovpartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Greece_Action-Plan_2019-2021_EN.pdf, p.26-28.

Commitment analysis

This commitment aims to publish statistical and economic data held by the Ministry of Economy and Development and to improve the quality of datasets, upgrade digital applications and produce visualisations of data on procurement, contracts, public works and services.

The commitment has sufficient relevance to the Access to Information OGP value since, if implemented fully, it will lead the Government to disclose more information. [60] It is verifiable, but it is not specific about the kinds of visualisations or digital applications, their purpose, the ways in which data quality could be improved, or the aims or criteria behind the datasets to be published.

The Ministry of Economy and Development (MED) has published more than 30 open data sets as of May 2019 on the data.gov.gr website [61], and over 150 open data sets have been made available as of May 2019 on the MED website [62].The data published on the MED website include fuel and refinery prices, food and consumer goods prices, and steel and aluminium imports. Some of these datasets (for instance, fuel prices, consumer goods prices) are also published on the data.gov.gr website.

Although one CSO actor [63] expressed confidence that datasets concerning the topic of economy will have high value for stakeholders, they did not specify which datasets were of high value. In this particular case, this actor is running a solidarity network for redistributing spare medications to low-income or no-income patients and might have benefitted from open data on high consumer prices by region, which could be made available by MED.

The commitment, if fully implemented, is expected to (a) make available for reuse some more datasets curated by the lead agency and supervised entities and (b) improve the quality of the datasets available for reuse. The potential impact of the commitment is coded as minor because despite aiming to make more datasets available to the public, with better-quality data and improved visualization and digital applications, it is not clear that this will change, improve or make any difference to current government practice beyond what is already mandatory, or resolve an identified problem. Nor is it clear whether the improvements will respond to the needs of citizens for development and participation as expressed in the commitment's objectives. MDI did not mention using any experience from implementation of the previous action plan in the design of this commitment or integrating into this commitment feedback from the action plan co-design process. Concerning the rationale behind choosing datasets to open, MDI mentioned perceived usefulness by internal ministry stakeholders and stated that no relevant stakeholders outside the public sector were involved in this process.

The commitment could benefit from greater engagement with citizens, data users, CSOs and other external stakeholders into the process of determining which datasets to publish. For instance, a CSO actor [64] explicitly mentioned information regarding consumer protection, which is almost impossible to obtain from the public sector, whereas the text of this commitment mentions integrating consumer protection data from a proprietary MED website into new open datasets, but without providing further details. The ministry's open data plans could have clearer links to public needs if it had been cocreated with civil society. At the same time, further desktop research [65] confirmed the interest in some datasets mentioned in the commitment (e.g. the datasets on fuel prices) and revealed a number of topical issues for this ministry's domain of responsibility, for which publishing open data would have a value and could help to improve policies and processes. An indicative example is information on the policies, subsidies, projects, calls and decisions related to new state investments.

Commitment 7. Open access to data of the Ministry of Economy and Development

● Verifiable: Yes

● Relevant: Yes, access to information

● Potential impact: Minor

● Completion: Substantial

● Did it open government? Marginal

The commitment sought to increase the quantity and quality of data publicly available from the Ministry of Economy and Development and supervised entities to foster better scrutiny and reusability of the data by citizens.

The OpenGovMonitor states that five out of six milestones are ongoing—concerning integration and improvement of datasets, upgrading digital applications and visualizations, and taking three decisions about data publication. According to OpenGovMonitor, the milestone to enable entities to publish data is completed. However, OpenGovMonitor does not contain links to evidence. A staff member of the General Directorate of Digital Policies and Governance of the current Ministry of Development and Investments provided evidence of the level of completion. [21] Data from the Ministry can be accessed on a specific page of the official website, and it has been regularly updated since 2016. [22] However, in many cases, links on the webpage point to datasets available as PDFs, not open data. On the other hand, the old open data portal showed an increase from 30 to 279 datasets from the Ministry of Economy and Development. [23] The new open data portal contained six datasets under the “Business and economy” topic, but these were last updated between 2016–2018, before the start of the action plan cycle. [24]

According to a Ministry representative, the General Directorate reportedly maintains statistics on the increase of the datasets published and encourages all departments and supervised entities to provide data in user-friendly formats (e.g., Excel, CSV) or provide website links. [25] Furthermore, the Ministry has nominated open data contact points per Directorate to improve the quality of the datasets and make digital applications for their use, involving external partners, which indirectly addresses milestones 2 and 3 of this commitment.

While there was a large increase in the number of datasets on the old open data portal by the Ministry, it is not clear to what extent these are stakeholder priorities, as Ministry representatives confirmed they did not undertake activities to engage potential users of their data. This, as well as the lack of evidence for the remaining activities that are ongoing, means that the implementation of this commitment had only marginal early results in opening government.