One of the reasons why corruption flourishes in Ukraine is the lack of public information available freely online. But Parliament is taking the first steps to transparency in this area.
On March 5, Ukrainian Parliament gave preliminary approval (with 243 votes) to a law that would make more public information available online and free of charge. If adopted into law, government agencies would be obliged to publish operational data, statistics and reports on a national open data web platform.
Besides helping to eliminate corruption and bureaucracy, this could be a huge boost for tech businesses.
President Petro Poroshenko submitted the law as part of the Digital Ukraine Association Initiative, actively promoted by Dmytro Shymkiv, deputy head of President’s Administration office and former chief at Microsoft Ukraine.
The national open data platform called Data.gov.ua was developed in April 2014 by the Ukrainian tech nongovernmental organization SocialBoost that promotes open access and other non-commercial social information technology projects. Microsoft Ukraine and the international charity fund Renaissance supported development financially.
The platform already holds wide range of data from hospitals, universities, courts, postal services and other state institutions.
The Ukrainian version was modeled after the United Kingdom’s portal.
For now the data are being collected and uploaded to the platform by volunteers and the SocialBoost team. But only five team members and some volunteers are obviously not enough to get data from governmental agencies from all over the country on the platform.
Denis Gursky, the head of the SocialBoost, says that the law will provide the framework for open data in Ukraine, but it won’t solve all the technical difficulties.
The types of data that are public, standards, staffing and responsibility for accuracy will have to be sorted out in subordinate laws.
For now, Gursky says, the plan is to follow the recommendations of the G8 Open Data Charter, which lists principles for open data organization.
Oleksandr Ryzhenko, the head the state agency for e-government, says that the current law needs to be enforced together with the law on open state budget data and open operational data from state-owned companies.
“All acting at the same time these laws would have positive impact in three dimensions – corruption elimination and transparency, opportunities to use data for businesses, convenience for society,” Ryzhenko says.
The feedback of society will help define how the public data system should be organized, says Mykhaylo Shmelyov, the national technology officer at Microsoft Ukraine.
“Open data law will launch a socially valuable service (government to client) G2C. This way government will report to citizens and citizens also need to have the technical ability to give feedback on the quality of governmental services and data,” Shmelyov says. “Providing this feedback can be another technical issue though, but it is also a priority and must be thought of.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Bozhena Sheremeta can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe.
