On July 20, the Chamber of Commerce of Montenegro, in cooperation with the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center Tehnopolis, organized a webinar workshop on “Open Data: demystification, significance and use on the local Level”.
The webinar aimed to draw the attention of the business sector, representatives of state and local institutions, NGOs, as well as the general public to the importance of open data, as well as the opportunities provided by such available data.
At the beginning of the webinar, Sandra Peric from the Chamber of Economy Montenegro presented “Open Data for Open European Innovations” project or ODEON, which she has been coordinating. As she told, the priority axis of this project is the promotion of the innovative capacities of the Mediterranean to develop smart and sustainable growth, while the specific goal of the project is the increased transnational activity of innovative clusters and the networks of key sectors in areas covered by the Mediterranean program.
After that, Mirjana Begovic, the Head of the Directorate for Electronic Administration of the Ministry of Public Administration Montenegro, provided basic information on open data, and then presented the results of Montenegro from 2016 until today in this area. In that period, she pointed out that Montenegro recognized the importance of open data, the Law on Amendments to the Law on Free Access to Information was drafted, the Open Data Portal was established, which was later improved and at the end of 2020 Montenegro became part of the European Open Data Portal. She concluded that numerous activities have shown commitment and readiness for further affirmation of the concept of open data.
What she put a special emphasis on is the Open Data Portal, which aims to be a place where the Public Administration has the opportunity to publish data in an open format. There are currently 106 data sets on the Portal, from 18 institutions that have opened their data, covering about 15 thematic areas. At the very end, she gave a few examples that showed what open data is and what they are used for, but also the basic steps that the Public Administration must take when opening data.
At the end of the workshop, Andreja Glušcevic, UNDP consultant at the Office for IT and e-Government of the Republic Serbia, said that open data is a resource that is freely available to all, available free of charge over the Internet, so technically accessible and machine-readable.
Through classic examples, she explained what open data should not contain, what the most common errors that occur in writing open data documents are, and that a document to be open and machine-readable should be simple so that each window has its value.
In the following, she spoke about the importance of open data, and that their accessibility gives the best insight into the work of the local governments. She also emphasized that if the data is used in the right way, problems in the community can be solved and clarified.
At the very end, through positive examples, she showed the audience that based on different open databases, different applications can be created with informative displays that are visually interesting and useful at the same time.
This event was organized as part of the project “Open Data for Open European Innovation” – ODEON (“Open Data for European Open Innovation”), which is implemented by the Chamber of Economy within the Mediterranean Transnational Cooperation Program “INTERREG Mediterranean”.
