Bulgaria shows progress on open governance commitments

A month ago the Bulgarian cabinet voted in a 33 point action plan for achieving open governance. The main goals of this plan are financial transparency, public registry improvement, public consultation and corporate social responsibility. One of the most important measures is publishing daily budget spending reports with a breakdown of payment reason and target. This measure was executed right away by the finance ministry. All ministries should follow suit as of August.

Here is an example of how those data can be used to understand public spending:

Other measures to tighten fiscal discipline are opening data on discrepancies in financial audits of companies and improving regulation and transparency in NGO funding.

Although Bulgaria boasts a well-written freedom of information act, there's still room for improvement. That's why the cabinet will amend it to improve transparency. There's not much details given in the plan, but preliminary talks point to the inclusion of open data as a requirement in new information systems and processes.

An electronic health care system that links all health centers is being developed as well. It will have built-in capability to access statistics about hospitals, doctors and audits. It may also be possible to track spreading of diseases while still protecting the privacy of patents. The first step is there – an open registry with near real-time birth data has been active since January 2012. This will allow citizens and businesses to extrapolate data for their own use, with graphs such as this one:

Another registry mentioned in the plan includes geographic, quantitative and qualitative data on natural resources, companies allowed to exploit them and audits of their activity.

A big part of the plan is corporate social responsibility and dialogue. Although technically the government can't regulate this process, the action plan includes measures for stimulating businesses to be more open and transparent, for improving dialogue related to legislation and regulation both at local and national level and finally – for developing best practices for social responsibility that are better suited for Bulgaria.

For the past month the cabinet has been working on a detailed documentation assigning responsibilities and goals to each of these 33 measures. Such details will help the public track and demand progress regardless of changes in government. Nevertheless, there's still a big gap in the plan – namely, how to ensure sustainability of open governance in Bulgaria. The experience of other countries shows that if public servants don't understand the benefits of open data and are not free to suggest and publish resources, we will end up with a limited number of fragmented datasets with diminishing quality. Rooting the concept of openness not only in information systems, but also in administration reform and day-to-day operations is the only way to ensure a lasting effect.

Still, it's safe to say that Bulgaria is taking important steps toward a truly open government – one that will surely be irreversible. Progressive journalists and active citizens will ensure that this plan will not be a one-time deal, but the beginning of a lasting process.

For more information on opengov in Bulgaria:

http://bg.okfn.org/ - the Bulgarian language blog of OKFN

http://opendata.yurukov.net/ - resources that me and other opendata activists maintain. Within two weeks they will publish 300,000 scraped court decisions with full text and metadata.

http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-bg/ - opendata mailing list in Bulgarian

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http://joaobatistadesouza12yahoo.com.br joao batista de souza

Os Bons exemplo devem ser seguidos por todas as Nações! Muito Legal.

http://yurukov.net/blog Boyan Yurukov

Hi Joao,
I’m hoping it will get even better. There are those in the cabinet that see the potential of opengov and are trying to push the agenda. The problem is that there’s almost no data journalism in Bulgaria. Thus even if we have the data, there’ll be only a few who would use it and extract meaningful results. We are working on that as well.

On the scraping front – we’ve also managed to scrape the 300000 documents&metadata and are now cleaning and preparing them for a release. I’ve also scraped 250000 procurement documents (nearly all of them since the procedure became public some years ago) and the whole public administration workforce database containing administration structure, people working in each unit and the vacant positions being opened and closed at each time. The latter two datasets are on ice for now until I find the time to derive their structure and put them in a database. All in all exciting time.

http://www.ideascale.com Jessica

This is very encouraging progress and great information to be sharing. I was wondering what sort of technology they were using to publish/share this data. It seems that would make a difference in public servant adoption of maintaining that source of open information.

http://yurukov.net/blog Boyan Yurukov

It’s hard to talk about a specific technology used by the government. There are a lot of resources out there, but they fall more in the scope of opengov than in opendata (check the “The New Ambiguity of ‘Open Government’” paper by Harlan Yu and David G. Robinson on that topic). Most of the data – even in the budget spending is either in PDF and Excel sheets, or obfuscated in web pages. Although they have a fairly consistent structure among them, pulling the data and using it in any way is a struggle.

In the data I’ve opened I’ve used mostly unix shell scripts, php and xslt transformations. Most of the data is published in XML and SQL format. Some of it – in CSV files. Others in Bulgaria use python. All of the apps I’ve written are ad-hoc – scraping daily specific pages and types of data.

You do make a good point that public servants need the tools to publish data, but those tools need to be in the government toolkit. This is important, because otherwise they won’t be used. I’ve built a platform for publishing reports for missing person cases. All data is open, geotaged, and mapped. Police officers don’t use it at all, because they are not sure they can. Instead the information goes from them, to their press officer, to the central press officer and then to me or the media. That may takes days if the information reaches me at all.

Currently we are negotiating either direct read-only access to the system keeping the budget spending data – SEBRA, or a way for public servants to pull data in a consistent and automatic format. Currently we have 9 ministries publishing daily reports in 6 different formats.

http://yurukov.net/blog Boyan Yurukov

There’s an update on the budget spending data in Bulgaria. Since the beginning of August 9 ministries started publishing reports. 6 are either not publishing the data yet, or it’s not linked on their page. It’s holiday season, so I’m guessing they are short-handed. I also found several committees publishing reports, which may indicate that all budget funded entities may start doing so.

The current issue is that the reports are not in consistent open format – most are in PDF and formatted Excel spreadsheets. The cabinet recognizes this as an issue and are looking into it. The open data community in Bulgaria will help them with ideas and solutions.
http://yurukov.net/blog Boyan Yurukov

In the article I talk about opening the court decisions in Bulgaria. This data is already out. Here’s a blog post on the topic [in Bulgarian] and some early graphs from the data:
http://bg.okfn.org/2012/08/10/sadebni-aktove/

We have about 580000 decisions and 607000 documents all with metadata like dates, court type and judge names, outcome, appeals and linked cases. The earliest decision is from 1999, but most of them are from the past 6 years.

The documents are cleaned from unnecessary formatting and are about 10Gb. They are ready for text mining by researchers.

We’ll try to automate the scraping process and provide weekly updates.
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John Patrick Bartolomiu

We should all follow the example of Bulgaria!