“I am working on a project Public Procurements of Slovakia for Transparency International. Requirement was to try to extract number of offers within a tender. I did, however it was strange: majority of number of offers were 1 per tender/contract. I was convinced that the value in document is something different that we are expecting and stared to persuade TIS that we do not have the value they want.

After couple of weeks, I’ve created couple of reports with the value, despite fact that I was sure that the report is wrong. Gabriel Sipos and his team from TIS started investigation and talked to Public Procurement Office. It turned out that the value is correct and is what TIS expected it to be: it is number of offers per contract. And yes, in Slovakia average was around 1,9 average number of offers per contract. After the finding I’ve created proper reports with all suppliers and all procurers, which had very interesting results. For example, ministry of Justice of Slovak Republic had 7 contracts for around 5,6m € total, with just one offer per-contract. And it looks like it is correct.

What I wanted to say is, that it is nice that programmers are scraping data and trying to visualise them. However, they may miss important points or might ignore interesting information just because it looks weird and unreal to them, as I almost did. Role of NGOs in this case is domain experts – the ones who know the “state of the state”, the ones who know how to investigate meaning of numbers or can tell if the numbers are correct or not. Programmers might produce interesting and colorful reports, but only with domain knowledge the reports can be useful.”

This post was written for us by Štefan Urbánek from Slovakia. Thank you!

Image used with permission of Open Knowledge Foundation under CC licence

Open Government Data Camp 2010 might sound like a distant event, but I decided to post about simply because some of our friends have attended it (and also because earlier I did not have the opportunity to do it properly;)). As it happened exactly on the same day as the Transparency Camp in Warsaw, I personally could not attend it, but I am really happy to hear that Central and Eastern Europe was represented in London on the 18th and 19th of November 2010. The event is nicely documented on-line, so you can find the programme here, and all the materials (including recorded sessions) on this site. There is also a good wiki collection of all involved people and projects.

Today however I would like to post the short conversation I had with one the attendees from our region, Štefan Urbánek from Slovakia (mentioned earlier on this blog):

Syl: What is your general feedback on Open Government Data Camp?

Štefan: It was a really great event. The most interesting was to put together people from government, journalists and geeks, and create dialogue between them. People from various groups were invited.

Syl: Why did you go to the event?

Štefan: It was very interesting, I wanted to learn more, I wanted to meet people and learn about what is currently happening. I also wanted to get feedback on what we are doing here.

Syl: Did you present your work?

Štefan: I was presenting something a little bit different based on the project. I was using project as a basis of talk about data quality.

Stefan Urbanek from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo.

Syl: What was the feedback on the presentation?

Štefan: I was really surprised that the presentation did what I wanted – it raised awareness around data quality. People who work with data do not consider its quality.

Syl: Did you meet people involved in projects similar to yours?

Štefan: I did meet with people from ckan and “where does my money go” projects. There will be a post about data quality on their blog shortly.

Syl: What inspired you:

Štefan: Many little specialties, each project had a specialty or a problem, that people can learn from. So it was a really good to share practice. However what I liked more than the presentations were the discussions beaten those – people sharing solutions between the official sessions. I also found  the topic of linking open data very interesting.

Syl: What about our region?

Štefan: I was introduced to few people from our region by Tony Bowden.  I think people I met are the people who were contacted by MySociety – the rest is rather unclear, so it looks like MySociety is driving those types of projects in Central and Eastern Europe. It’s great but my impression is that it is not enough yet when compared to the Western countries.

Syl: Do you think it is down to the lack of events in our region?

Štefan: Yes, and I missed even more stories from Eastern Europe, because sometimes we are solving different issues than the Western countries. For example I was at TransparencyCamp in Washington in March too, where some of the problems presented originated from various regions and I found it all was very useful.

Let us know your thoughts on some of the points made by Štefan. If you attended the Open Government Data Camp, we would love to hear your feedback too.  Do leave us a comment!

As I mentioned at the beginning of my presence here, this blog is designed to serve its readers with updates on the projects MySociety is currently working with. You need to understand that by doing so I am establishing organic conversations with many advocates of transparency in the region, so I think it would be really good to share those with you. I hope to open this space up for more discussion leading to knowledge share and inspiration. Yesterday I talk to Štefan Urbánek from Slovakia, who is deeply involved in transparency issues in his country. First, he used his data management experience for work with Fair Play Alliance (documented for Technology for Transparency here, in English). According to Štefan Fair Flay Alliance is pretty good NGO and has gathered quite a lot of valuable data. They have great knowledge and understanding of free information act in Slovakia. Štefan was working with their team on an application aimed to publish and present the data in easily accessible and readable form. (You can learn about it more from this presentation). It seems however that the great amount of data was undervalued and the process of publishing it became difficult due to the lack of marketing, promotion but also worries about potential consequences of that step (more on it below).

Now Štefan is working on a new project, Public Procurement by Transparency International, Slovakia. Transparency International in Slovakia is the most technologically advanced NGO in the country. It has access to great deal of data but also invests time in creating buzz around it – from blog posts to off-line talks with representatives about the findings resulting from the data. You can find about the project here or in this document. The final results of this project are published in reports.

While talking to Štefan I grew increasingly interested in his personal involvement in those projects. He said, he is:

“Trying to use methods, tools or way of doing things from corporate environment to implement in this open society, open data form as those are already invented but do not being used in a public environment.

Corporate environment is driven mostly by profit, growth, competition or good name. To know their standing they have to know exactly what is going on: how much they have, how much is going in and out. Therefore there is big pressure to have good measurement, analysis and reporting tools. Without those tools it would be only intuition or good guess.”

Throughout our conversation we have managed to identify the challenges for governments (and other NGO’s) in applying the same rules to their environment:

1. Lack of pressure: government does not have to compete with other governments, government has stable “paying customer base” – there is no competition for “customers” to leave to. Government representatives do not see benefit of attracting new customers, increasing (voluntarily from “customer’s” side) revenues, nor they see no benefit of using the analytics to optimize their processes.

2. The data and analytics are expensive: ordinary people but even government cannot afford consultants, tools and storage of the data.

3. Missing data literacy – even if they had data, they would not know what to do with it. NGO’s should step in and teach people to use and to look for it. But first they need to know how to do it, how to look at the data. They are not doing it because they do not have enough of competence in this area. The people educated in IT or data management start working for corporations, not NGO’s. But we are at the stage we do not need a lot of advanced knowledge or complicated algorithms for now, so we can still change this situation. NGO’s need to start to connect and learn from “domain experts” first, and then they should use the learned knowledge to be not only experts in their area, but also evangelists.

There is also the issue of releasing the data. Sometimes we are scared of the data! NGOs are sometimes hesitating with data publishing for various reasons. May be they are afraid of legal issues (inaccurate data etc), data completeness (they want to be very up-to-date), application quality (under development, permanent beta). Approach of being a perfectionist is not appropriate here, as there will always be “something to be improved”. We need to get feedback as soon as possible; we need to make use of data despite their quality. Proper legal statements and data description can prevent possible legal conflicts. So it’s important to open the data asap and let people to browse it, send feedback and corrections, to check the data quality with appropriate disclaimers. As Štefan well put it:

“Release early – release often. “

So at the moment Štefan is trying to evangelize data knowledge and create really simplified and easy used solutions. He is trying to port knowledge from corporate environment to government, showing how we can benefit from data, what we can learn from them, how to transform them into information and information to knowledge.

We will hear more from him, as the entire conversation has raised more questions, but I would not like to keep you too long. For now let me leave you with one idea: it would be great if someone could talk to NGO’s to find out why they do not want to/are worried about releasing the data. That seems to be the case in Slovakia but can be in other countries and regions of the world as well. What do you think?