Presentation held by Mrs. Irina Tisacova within the Opening Up Development event, held on December 14th 2011 in Chisinau

1. GOVERNMENT
OF THE REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA e-Government Center
Moldova Open Government Data
FOR A TRANSPARENT AND ACCOUNTABLE
GOVERNMENT
Irina Tisacova, e-Government Center

2. Starting Point
• The Government of the Republic of Moldova is guided by its Activity Program
for 2011-2014*, entitled “European Integration: Freedom, Democracy,
Welfare”, which has 24 action points explicitly aimed at improving
government transparency and accountability, of which:
– Enforcing the Law on Access to Information and Transparency in the
Decision Making by posting open government data online;
– adopting the “Access to Open Government Data” Initiative;
Citizen participation in government Creating innovative applications
decision-making process through and e-services for citizens through
opening up government data greater reuse of open data
* http://gov.md/doc.php?l=en&idc=445&id=3729
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3. First steps
April 15th 2011
The e-Government Center launches the open government
portal and a contest to promote the development of
applications
April 29th 2011
Institutionalizing the Open Data Program. Prime Minister Filat
signs a directive, making Moldova one of the first 16 countries
implementing an Open Government Data Initiative
May 25th 2011
Ministry of Finance publishes the entire database of public
expenses in raw and in pivot table formats (the BOOST Tool)
July 15th 2011
A two-day Tech Camp Moldova was organized to both educate
and facilitate brainstorming about new uses of open data in
Moldova. The outcome was a set of “solutions” that could
develop into deployable applications and e-services

4. Open Government Data Globally
• USA - http://data.gov – 390 136 data sets
• UK – http://data.gov.uk - 7 700 data sets
• Australia – http://data.gov.au – 805 data sets
• Sweden – http://opengov.se – 106 data sets
• Moldova – http://date.gov.md – 155 data sets

5. Open Government Data Globally

6. Open Data Portal v.1

7. Speeding up
In the first two weeks from launch, the unique governmental
portal has registered:
– 67 data sets uploaded
– 5 public institutions contributing
– 1,500 unique visitors of the portal
– 300 downloads of data sets
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8. Where we are today, 8 months later…
– 155 datasets
– 20 public authorities opened up data
– 11 out of 16 ministries published data
– 17,273 views
– Over 20,000 downloads
Most active and committed institutions:
– Ministry of the Interior
– Ministry of Education
– Public Acquisitions Agency
– Ministry of Information Technology and Communication
– Ministry of Health

9. Next steps
• Updating date.gov.md to increase its
functionality and improve user experience
• Launch of the Web version of BOOST
• Identifying challenges of some ministries in
releasing data
• Building applications that will use open data
to solve social issues

10. Open Data Portal v.2

11. Web BOOST

12. Bumps in the road
• Open Data is supply driven and not demand driven. Demand should drive supply
PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS:
• Inefficient data collection process, which impedes simple release of government data
by various ministry
• Opening up data is seen by many as a process that requires addition human and time
resources
• Low quality of data
• Data is often sent in Word format, in an unstructured form and with no related
metadata
• Inaccurate data with different ID’s presented within the same Ministry
• Miscommunication within Ministries and with their subordinate institutions
• Unwillingness to release data by misattributing it to commercial secret
• Impediments in releasing open government data indicate to inefficiencies within
some Ministries. The more efficient and modernized the Ministry, the easier and
faster is the release of data.
CIVIL SOCIETY / NGOs:
• Lack of a vision of how to utilize open data to provide solutions to social issues
• Lack of visualization apps that would help the public digest the data

13. Are we there yet? – NO
• Legal aspects:
– Adoption of the Law on PSI reuse
– Publishing data under OGD license(s)
• Promotion:
– Tech camps / Applications building contests
– Discussion boards and community building
– Motivating NGOs and citizens to use data for social change
• Sustainability and quality improvements:
– Better metadata
– Linked data
– APIs development / publishing
• Capacity building & training
– Open Data basics, linked data, semantic web
• Cooperation and partnerships
– Involvement of local governments
– Open Government Partnership, Open
Knowledge Foundation, Semantic Web etc.
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14. Thank you for your attention!
Do you have any questions?
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