What problem are you solving?:

Number of freedom of information requests in Kosovo is quite low, and even lower is the level of requests being answered. Emulating whatdotheyknow.org, our website will enable an easy way to request official information with the aim of increasing the number of such requests. Our second aim is to highlight those institutions that are failing to respond to such requests.

Describe your idea:

InformataZyrtare.org will guide interested citizens to the right official and help her write a successful information request in the two official languages of Kosovo, Albanian and Serbian. The website will be highly autonomous and will be complemented by a simple forum to be staffed by volunteers in order to answer any questions not already addressed. All requests will also have commenting open to the general public. The partners will tweak the website/content in response to comments being made after the website is launched. We will also pay attention to search engine optimization and promotion to the general public.

What country will this operate in?: Kosovo

Who are you?:

The project will be realized by two organizations: FLOSS Kosova, which will handle the technical work and GAP Institute, which will build the content and promote the website.

FLOSS Kosova is a young non-governmental non-profit organization established to promote free and open source software, knowledge, culture and technical standards. It’s main activity is an annual international Software Freedom Conference.

The Institute for Advanced Studies GAP is a Kosovo Think Tank. A priority of the Institute is to mobilize professionals to address the country’s pressing economic, political and social challenges. GAP’s main objectives are to bridge the gap between government and people, and to bridge the gap between problems and solutions.

What problem are you solving?:

The problems that we are solving are to have more transparency in the Municipal Life during the Political, Economical and Social processes that Kosova is going for the moment .
These have influenced AKK to compile a strategy for actions in Kosovo, that will inform citizens regarding their rights and responsibilities, as well as efficiency and transparency of municipalities, produce comparative studies to evaluate the work of Members of the Municipal Assemblies as well as political entities, mitigate and influence citizens contribution in public policies in the other side.

Describe your idea:

Activities: In the created database, AKK will publish all draft regulation that is being reviewed in the Municipal Assembly’s. In addition to that AKK will create a virtual forum where citizens and interested NGOs could send their feedback to the published draft regulation. The most important and relevant feedbacks, AKK will send to the relevant Municipality, Committees of the Municipal Assembly which could incorporate them in the final versions of the draft regulation.

What country will this operate in?: Kosovo

Who are you?:

The background information on the AMK.

The Association of Municipalities of Kosovo (the AMK) is a non-governmental, non-for-profit organization representing the interests of Kosovo municipalities. Established in 2001, the AMK has, at the present time, 15 full time members of staff and is managed by the Executive Director.

The activities of the AMK are regulated by its statute. As stipulated by the statute, the AMK represents municipal interests in the central government institutions, provides advisory and technical services to the member municipalities.

At the present time, 29 out of 33 Kosovo municipalities actively participate in the work of the AMK and use its services.

What problem are you solving?:

Kosovo is preparing to organize local elections on 15 of November 2009, which are considered and the main test of the democracy processes and the skill of the Kosovo institutions to manage the situation and processes independently.
In our country who is still on transition development, during all the elections held, we heard about many promises, such as: road building, green parks, children’s places, sports hall for recreation, support for youth, students on health education etc.
Because of the reasons that we mentioned below and by considering that in Kosovo exist a strong democracy and freedom of expression is defined also in Constitution, our organization is planning to make a project proposal with a name “You promised … so keep it” which help the citizens that through the web page to see all the time the promises that the Mayors of Municipalities are keeping, promises that are negotiated and promises that are broken.

Describe your idea:

The aim of the project is to create a web page through which we will show the information about the Mayors and their promises during the election campaign in the 8 main Municipalities in Kosovo.
During the next 4 years of Mandate after they have been elected, these Mayors will be monitored by our organization by checking the keeping of their promises.

During all the time the web page will be updated with new information and every three month we will provide a briefly report every three month.
The project is based on main objectives as following
• Citizens will be informed about the performance of the Mayor of Municipality
• We will empower the democracy and raise the right of freedom expression by giving a space to the citizens to express their opinions about a specific issues in the municipality and possibilities of solving
• Through the web page, everybody can read information, vote on the voting pools about specific issues and bring out the data analysis

What country will this operate in?: Kosovo

Who are you?:

Our organizations mission is to empower the participation of the civil society in using the Information and Communication Technologies and also building a better strategy on establishing the new initiatives from the community on developing the digital.
In order to reach our mission, the NGO “Mediafleta” will be focused on the main components as follow but will not be limited strictly to them:
• Empowerment of the Democracy through the use of ICT (E-democracy)
Safety and Internet
• Human Resources Development and Capacity Building
• ICT Policy, Leadership and development of the research program
• E-learning, E-society and Digital Advocacy

What problem are you solving?:

The Assembly of Kosova has its website which has the basic information on the functions of the Assembly, Presidency, Committees and MPs. However, Assembly of Kosova has not achieved to publish in its website the draft laws being drafted in the Assembly, electronic voting of MPs, Parliamentary questions addressed by MPs, as well as their presence in the Plenary Sessions and Committees Meetings. In this way citizens of Kosova have little information on the representation of their interests done by their MPs. Through the implementation of this project, citizens would have more information on the work of Assembly of Kosova and they will have more opportunities to be engaged in its proceedings. By offering to citizens more information on the performance of the current MPs, they will have an additional opportunity to reflect on how their MP-s have kept their promises given during the electoral campaign, and to think on how they will vote in the next elections.

Describe your idea:

Aim of the project is that through creation of a database of the Assembly of Kosova to narrow the gap between the transition of Kosovo society and the real democracy, by informing, increasing awareness and educate the citizens on how function the Assembly of Kosova, and as e result, improving the image of the Assembly and increase the public participation in the public policies.

Project Objectives

• Information of the citizens on the performance of the MPs of the Kosova Assembly;
• Increase the participation of citizens and Civil Society organizations in the lawmaking process;

What country will this operate in?: Kosovo

Who are you?:

I work at Kosova Democratic Institute as Program Manager of the Central Governance Project.

About KDI

KDI’s mission is to support democratic development in Kosovo by empowering nongovernmental organizations and citizens to enhance the transparency, accountability and responsiveness of governing institutions and improve the efficiency of these institutions through citizen participation in decision-making.

VISION

KDI aims to be regional organization that influences political processes by offering assistance in the process of democratization.

Organization Profile

The main constituency group served by our organization is:

• Citizens,
• Non-governmental organizations,
• NGO networks
• Formal and non-formal citizen and youth-based groups

What problem are you solving?:

The problem is that people don’t like reading, we should have the texts read in multiple languages.

Describe your idea:

See my example here :
http://www.archive.org/details/KosovoWikipediaArticlesVideo

Source Code checked in, it can read any pdf or odt file.

What country will this operate in?: Kosovo

Who are you?:

I am a free software activist who founded flossk.org free libre open source software Kosova. we organised with the help of OSI the kosovasoftwarefreedom.org SFK09 conference.