When you look at your smartphone in the morning to see whether it is cold outside and whether you need to take an umbrella, you are using open meteorological data. Driving to work and looking at the GPS navigator, you are able to avoid traffic jams due to open data on traffic congestion. If you use public transport and tap an application on your phone that lets you determine whether the next Metro train is arriving any time soon, you are using open schedule data. Looking at user-generated Open Street Map applications you can find your way in hundreds of cities worldwide due to crowdsourced open mapping data.

 

All of these applications and useful resources are already in the lives of Ukrainians. Yet, many don't even recognize that what they are so used to are, in fact open datasets that make their lives every day so much easier. Now, not only these but many other datasets may become open for use in non-profit and commercial sectors if the legal initiative by the Reanimation Package of Reforms with the support of UNDP and the Presidential Administration makes it through the Parliament.

 

Draft law 2171, shaped as a complex of amendments to the existing "Access to Information" legislation, takes the existing regulations on transparency to a whole new level. Before this, a citizen would have to file an official request to receive information (also known as "freedom of information" or FOI request). The advent of open data and the "digital by default" principle removes this necessity in many areas. Filing FOI requests in hope that the government agency will give you a reply, hoping that it will indeed be the information that you require, and that you won't have to be faced with a reply that information is for internal office use only may be a past-day practice. Now, instead of being reactive (waiting for the citizen or entity to ask for it), the principles of proactive information disclosure are put in place. Government agencies and state bodies will be requested to shape their statistical data, data on addresses, products, performance, financial indicators and many more issues into open datasets (structured files that contain data) and upload these to a central repository. The pilot of such a repository has been created by the Social Boost CSO in early 2014 with assistance of Microsoft Ukraine and is now located at http://data.gov.ua for open testing with the first pilot 100 datasets.

 

What data shall Ukraine be thinking about opening in the first place? The G-8 Open Data Charter gives a hint at what these priority datasets could include. Top-list data is, amongst others: company/business registers, crime statistics and safety, weather, agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting data, lists of schools and other educational facilities, performance of schools, pollution and energy consumption levels, local budget, national budget (planned and spent), topography, postcodes, national maps, local maps, government contact points, election results, legislation and statutes, salaries (pay scales), hospitality/gifts to officials, national statistics, census data, infrastructure, wealth, health, skills of the population, public transport timetables, access points broadband penetration and many, many more. As datasets open up mandated by the new legislation and the ordinances of the Cabinet of Ministers that regulate when, how many datasets and in which formats are to be published nationwide, the gains to the national economy may materialize as added value to software and services based on open data gets generated. Estimates of the Warsaw Institute for Economic Studies state that big and open data may generate up to 206 billion Euros of GDP for the EU-28 by 2020 if the growth levels are sustained. May this, then, become a booster for the Ukrainian economy as well?

 

Apart from introducing the notion of open data and describing the general requirements for publication of datasets for free use, re-use and redistribution, regulations also provide for the so much necessary safeguards that accompany any open data initiative. Thus, for instance, the legislation provides for anonymization of any data that is published as an open dataset. The draft also amends other existing laws to make explicit references to necessary publication of some data as open data. Thus, open datasets are to include registries of NGOs and universities, data on securities markets, geospatial data on master plans, broadcaster registry, companies and private enterprise registries.

 

If adopted, the law would entrust the Cabinet of Ministers to pass technical regulations that stipulate which technical formats are to be used in publication of open data in accordance to global best practices, which state bodies will be first mandated to produce, publish and control quality of the data published. In such case, the first test datasets on http://data.gov.ua would be supplanted by a large batch of updates and additional files. Introduction of the "one-stop-shop" solutions for open data, such as the national open data portal are usually a potent stimulus for individuals, NGOs and commercial companies to start building services based on the data available. Thus, the US portal at this point of time has 138,200 datasets, the UK boasts of 23,500 datasets and neighboring Moldova has already published 794 datasets in over two years of its portal launch.

 

The draft law on open data was taken by experts of the Presidential Administration as part of cooperation with RPR that had, in turn, elaborated the draft with assistance of UNDP, and placed it into the package of initiatives entitled "Digital Ukraine". "A digital format has to be in place, as it is in the majority of countries of the world, which enables you to consume electronic data, so that analysis may be performed. This enables comparison, analysis and fosters transparency. And the government needs to be transparent" noted Dmytro Shymkiv, Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine and former CEO of Microsoft Ukraine.

 

The use of open, well-structured and free data for the benefit of the community and development of the national IT businesses and startups may be a reality once the law is adopted and the relevant technical requirements are agreed by the Cabinet of Ministers. If all goes according to plan, you won't only be able to continue using those favorite apps of yours, but also be able to continue selecting the best universities for your children or best schools that have the highest math or foreign language test scores. And more: you'll be able to find out the fastest way by public transport to the nearest pharmacy that has the cheapest medication, while also determining whether you should take a coat for your trip, and whether you will be able to make it in time to send that letter in the nearest post office, including a reminder about the price of the stamps that you require. With quality and truly open data the limit is, after all, only your imagination!