How is Opendata progressing in Bulgaria

1. Opendata from the trenches
Lessons learned while opening Bulgarian government data
Bozhidar Bozhanov, advisor to the deputy prime minister for
coalition policy and public administration

2. State so far
• We have a CKAN based portal: http://opendata.government.bg
• Initially donated by an NGO
• We have more than 120 datasets (variable quality)

3. The notion of open data
• “It is our data, we have a responsibility”
• “People will understand the data incorrectly”
• “We put it on PDF on the site once a year”
• How do we address that:
• Organize seminars and events
• Explain, with examples (e.g. mobile apps)
• Get help from the NGOs
• ...but it’s a long road

4. Resistance to change
• This won’t work “for all sorts of reasons” (Sir Humphrey Appleby)
• Legal - “we don’t have a legal reason to do it”
• “Legal difficulties are best because they can be made totally incomprehensible and can go on
forever.” (Yes, minister)
• Technical - “we don’t have the technical expertise to do it”
• Financial - “we need more money to do it”
• How do we address that:
• Legal reasons - changes to the Access to public information act make it mandatory to publish and
support open data
• Technical - we are creating a State e-governance agency
• Financial - we explain why no extra money is needed

5. Technical skills
• Lack technical expertise of data owners
• With a few pleasant exceptions
• Lack of capacity
• How do we address that:
• Trainings
• Tools (converting XLS to CSV properly, automated data upload)
• Ask companies who support the software
• Help

6. Quality of data
• Data is often on paper
• Data is mostly kept in Excel files
• With nice headers and merged cells
• Data is sometimes even kept in Word documents
• Data is dirty
• Due to legal “mishaps”
• Due to input errors and lack of integrity checks
• Data is incomplete
• How do we address that:
• Help, dataset by dataset
• Move important data to software systems

7. Software systems
• Lack of open data exports
• Only predefined reports in non-machine readable formats
• Horrible data models
• No desire from most companies
• Complex procedures for getting access to the data
• How do we address that
• Criteria for all software systems build with EU funding: open data interfaces

8. We are not unique with these issues...
• The UK has the same issues, but they started earlier
• Person by person, department by department “lobbying” for open data
• We are just two IT advisors, one government expert
• Even the UK has basically just Antonio :)

9. Our measures (summary)
• Making open data cool
• Amending the Access to public information act
• Creating a state agency for e-governance, explicitly responsible for open data
• Centrally prioritising data sets to be opened
• Defining mandatory requirements for software systems (no open data - no
funding)
• Helping with our own skills (developing tools, writing SQL queries)
• Organizing trainings and events
All of these are possible thanks to the political will

10. Results
• Change in OKFN rank: from 51 to 16 in one year
• We missed some important low-hanging fruit: the licenses
• From “beginners” to “trend setters” (Open Data Maturity in Europe 2015)
• Some impact and tools:
• Data about citizen registrations revealed illegal electoral activity
• Procurement data tools
• School ranks visualisation
• Still a long way to go...
• Quality of many datasets is questionable
• Commercial register still not published as open data (working on it)
• Changing the attitude towards openness - we’re just starting

11. Thank you