Perspectives of Open Data in Belarus (and closed societies overall) Алексей Лявончик

1. Perspectives of Open Data in Belarus
(and closed societies overall)
Laksiej Lavončyk
opendata.by

2. Open data is a concept that some data should
- be available to public without copyright,
patent, etc;
- come in format facilitating easy analysis;
- be easily comparable

7. Promoting open data means
- hoovering available data into one place
- brokering easier access to data
- converting them into standard formats
- making them comparable and analyzable

8. Making data open does not mean:
- revealing copyrighted commercial data
- revealing classified government information

9. Access to data
Freedom of Information (FoI) right based
regulations and laws

10. Machine Readable Format (MRF)
allows immediate import of data into analytical
and visualization software
allows data analysis with no or little prepping
allows easy data comparability

11. Typical Belarus. That’s not MRF

13. That’s MRF

14. MRF are several formats that allow information
to be easily analyzed and compared;
Among the others, .csv, .xls, .json have the
widest frequency of use
Info produced by Belarusian state bodies is
generally published in pdfs, scanned images,
sometimes photoes

15. In a closed society generally
• there is no strategy on publication and
handling machine-readable data
• act on informatisation, information, and
information protection
• act on public requests
• legally not regulated initiatives of some state
agencies

18. Definition of information that is not restricted
from public use exists in legal acts
Information may be released by state agencies
at request
There is right to unrestricted information
There is no clear obligation for state agencies to
release info at request

19. The law on public requests stipulates technical
aspects of communication between public and
state agencies.
It does not stipulate obligatory release of data
as per FoI
It does not require officials publish detailed info
online

20. There is, as standard, no legal framework for
information to be released in MRF
There are several agencies which are more open
than others
And yet, their comparatively advanced stance
towards open data is not an internal policy but
rather private initiative on low and mid level

21. Open agencies in Belarus
Belarusian Commitee for Statistics
National Bank
Land Registry
Ministry for Trade
Ministry for Interior
Belarusian Meteorology Center
multile local authorities in and outside Miensk

26. As of 2015, data are generally available from
state agencies in comparative abundance.
At the same time they are available mostly in
unreadable formats which require significant
efforts to format and compare these data.
Belarusian media can’t spare human and IT
resourses to analyse these data.

27. Opendata.by
Opendata.by is an initiative of activists and
journalists to promote open data.
As of September 2015, this initiative was 12-
core staff and >200 volunteers strong.
Community is present in >40 locations in Belarus

32. Challenges
• absence of legal framework for information
release
• absence of open data concept
• absence of CC license definition

33. Opportunities
• hundreds strong community available to
process and format data
• change of generations in state agencies
making latter more technology-friendly

34. THANK YOU!