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Romania – On the map of the countries that celebrated the International Open Data Day

Claudia Iordache|

The Coalition for Open Data and the Government of Romania, in partnership with the Embassy of the United States, the Embassy of the United Kingdom and the Embassy of Netherlands in Romania organized on 20th of February, at the National Library of Romania, the national conference on opening public sector data (Open Data Day 2015) and on 21st and 22nd of February the Open Data Hackathon, thus placing Romania on the map of the countries celebrating the International Open Data Day.

At the end of 2011, Romania joined the Open Government Partnership, committed to improving the transparency of public institutions in the context of the development of new technologies. The main way this was to be achieved was by publishing public data in open formats. At the beginning of 2015, the national platform, data.gov.ro hosts over 200 data sets: budgetary executions, immigration statistics, and baccalaureate results. In order to make use of the data sets provided by the public institutions and to harness their potential for citizens, 70 IT specialists, students, employees and representatives of the civil society have voluntarily worked for 2 days at developing useful applications during the Open Data Hackathon.

The Open Data Day 2015 Conference

The most relevant leaders, the President of Romania, through his Counsellor Andrei Muraru and the Prime-Minister of Romania, Victor Ponta, reiterated the importance of open governance, of transparency and of free and open access to information of public interest. „We must become a Romania of usable and easy-to-access data instead of a Romania of theoretically-existing data but locked into an archive somewhere”, the President affirmed in his message, whilst the Prime-Minister, who has participated in person at the event, stated that any new initiative will be endorsed.

Over 200 representatives of non-governmental organizations, public institutions, business sector, national and international experts, among whom the Head of data.gov.uk, Antonio Acuña, gathered at the Open Data Day 2015 Conference. The event was a marathon of open data in several fields: justice, business, culture, natural resources, in order to prove the wide scope of fields that could benefit from increasing the availability of open data. For instance, in the domain of justice, publishing information regarding the length of the legal cases, the number of cases compared to the number of judges, can lead to a sense of predictability and can provide an overall assessment of the performance of the courts of law. This has already been implemented in Romania by the onoratainstanta.ro platform. In the natural resources field, the main subjects continue to be the access to contracts between the Romanian state and companies. There has been emphasized the necessity of consulting the civil society and the communities before any decision regarding exploitation is taken by the agencies in charge.

A drawback encountered by the business sector has been the hitherto reduced number of accessible data sets. A more extensive array of data sets could allow the rapid and creative development of some low-cost solutions based on analyzing open public data. Providing access to cultural materials in open formats is a practice linked to a change of mentality at the institutional level since, unlike other sets of public data, cultural works are subject to copyright constraints when it comes to re-using them.

Examples of applications developed this weekend that are using open data

On Saturday and on Sunday, the Open Data Hackathon put Romania on the map of the countries that organized events dedicated to developing web or mobile applications by making use of open data. The applications developed had to be useful for the citizens. To this end, public data sets have been used, along scanned or photographed documents (such as the archives of the city halls of the Bucharest districts, which have been transformed into open access, easy-to analyze by the citizens formats), all of these having contributed to the development of 17 applications by over 70 participants.

Fictional Municipalities is another initiative that has overlapped data sets from the National Institute of Statistics, the Romanian Postal Office, the National Agency for Cadastre and Real Estate Publicity. The project discovered that 1% of the Romanian municipalities have disappeared or have become depopulated, 27 of them having no human inhabitant, although 126 animals have been registered.

On what Street do I live? processed data sets provided by the Bucharest City Hall, the Permanent Electoral Authority (PEA) and the Romanian Post Office, in order to standardize the names of the streets, also highlighting that in the data sets of the PEA are 10% more streets than in the data sets of the City Hall.

The winning ideas of the hackathon were:

  1. ONG Search, a map of all the non-governmental organizations in Romania, providing the name, the county, the registering number, the purpose and the field in which these are activating
  2. Postal codes, an idea that set out to create postal codes for each street, by carefully circumscribing the geographical areas corresponding to each code, in order to avoid an overlap of two codes on the same street, or the existence of a code on the street different from the code on the building
  3. Fictional municipalities.

The prizes for the winning teams have been provided by the Embassy of the United States in Romania, by Microsoft and by the Academy of Economic Studies.

The National Open Data Day Conference and the Open Data Hackathon were organized as part of the project The Coalition for Open Data, financed by EEA Grants 2009-2014, within the NGO Fund in Romania. 

 

Translated by Adelin Dumitru.

Filed Under: Champions Europe Fiscal Openness Judiciary National Open Data Private Sector Public Participation Publication of Budget/Fiscal Information Right to Information
Open Government Partnership