Ukraine’s open data community had a moment of celebration on Sept. 21 – the Open Data Forum, which took place in Kyiv’s Mystetskyi Arsenal, attracted government officials, civil society activists and business people to discuss the development of open data in Ukraine.
The event was an excellent opportunity to discuss the successes, remaining challenges and lessons learned – the good, the bad, and the ugly- in the area.
The good
In just one year Ukraine has jumped from 62nd to 44th place in the international Open Data Barometer, an annual study that analyses the impact of open data initiatives around the world.
International experts say Ukraine’s surge in the ranking was one of the most impressive results of 2016. The discussions at the Open Data Forum revealed why and how Ukraine improved so quickly.
Open data programs can only be successful and effective if there is a dynamic ecosystem connecting the producers and users of open data. Open data is seen as driver of transparency, as citizens can see how effective their government is.
Ukrainian ministries currently publish key anti-corruption data sets – spending through e-data, procurement through Prozzoro, the company register kept by the Ministry of Justice, the register of court decisions, and others. One key recent win is that the Ministry of Justice recently published a beneficial ownership register and presented it at Concordia’s Annual Summit in New York on Sept. 18-19. For this, the ministry won an Open Data Award and became the best performing of Ukraine’s ministries in the field.
But it’s not only ministries that are taking massive strides towards an open culture. During the forum, it was announced that the cities of Dnipro, Drohobych, Chernivtsi and Vinnytsya had adopted the Open Data Charter, and international collaboration of governments and experts that sets out six principles for how governments should publish information. By adopting the charter, these four cities are signaling a high level commitment to open data.
But these successes can’t be seen as the achievements of government only. Often civil society is the key driver for open data, and after the Revolution of Dignity Ukraine’s strong civil society and business community has constantly demanded the publishing of data for greater transparency and accountability.
As Ukraine has a growing startup scene, with a large number of talented IT specialists, much of the demand is coming from the business community. During the forum, the Open Data Challenge, the first national IT competition, showcased 10 new innovative projects that use open data. The finalists – which included winners Open Coal Market, Court on the Palm and Fines UA – showed the wide range of possible open data use, from a court decisions registry to data on blood donors. This is a healthy ecosystem, where data publishing is driven by demand from civil society and business, and this will ensure that the opening up of data will not slow down.
The bad
While many achievements were highlighted, key challenges remain. Although a large amount of data is published, the quality of some of it is poor. As a lot of users and experts note, a lot of time is still spent on cleaning data to make it useful for the creation of new projects.
But it’s not surprising that the quality of the data is lower than expected by the open data community. There is a common myth in Ukraine that open data is free. But just because a data set can be freely used does not mean there is no cost to collecting or releasing the data.
Making an open data source sustainable usually requires the backing of its management, and the support of staff responsible for maintaining data quality. If a government is not able to secure funding to cover the cost of active support, the common practice abroad is to charge for access or enhanced services, or to secure funding from another source that supports open data publication.
This is an untapped opportunity for Ukraine as yet, but as the national open data program matures, the government will be able to collect and publish better-quality data.
The ugly
While some ministries take massive steps towards open culture, other remain closed.
International open data practice shows that open data is not only an anti-corruption tool, but rather that its key value is in promoting economic growth, when business creates commercial data-driven services and products.
But as Max Nefyodov, the first deputy minister at the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade of Ukraine, wisely said during the forum “the key challenge for open data is philosophical. Some government officials still believe that data belongs to them and it is unacceptable (for others) to make commercial gains on this data.”
In Ukraine the law on the access to public information states that open data is data that can be used and reused by anyone, even for commercial purposes. However, in Ukraine it is common knowledge that it’s possible to buy data from the government on the black market.
It’s obvious that some government officials make profit from this, yet it benefits only a few. By selling data and preventing it from being used by the wider community, Ukraine potentially loses up to 0.5 percent growth in GDP.
In contrast, by opening data for wider use, the government supports a large, talented IT community by giving them raw material for new products and services.
How can the bad and the ugly be fixed?
The most important task for open data community is to keep up “open data momentum” by building a range of impactful and successful stories. When open data solves a problem and there is a clear socio-economic benefit, it’s important to connect the release of data to tangible benefits, so opening up data is irresistible to all ministries, rather than just the most progressive ones.
For that reason the Kyiv School of Economics is currently conducting a study into the economic benefit of open data, where should clearly show how much economic growth Ukraine could gain from releasing data (the report will be released in January 2018).
Only by demonstrating the clear benefits of opening up data sources will it be possible to persuade and motivate the top leadership, who are not on board yet. However, only a combination of top-down leadership and front-line champions within the civil service can drive the progress of open data successfully.
So there need to be more opportunities for civil servants to take part in continuous learning about open data. In a combination of open data publication and ongoing communication about it, the key task is to encourage data use, and to foster external support from business, civil society and academia to drive continued demand for open data.
External support will help to maintain the political will to support open data, and be a source of ongoing dialogue. Ukraine has only started its open data journey, and it has been a successful start. More challenges remain, but as the Open Data Forum highlighted, the country has enough energy to solve them.
Kateryna Onyiliogwu is the Open Data Team Lead, USAID/UK Aid and the Eurasia Foundation’s “Transparency and Accountability in Public Administration and Services” project.
