In the period from February 16 to February 18, 2012, Sarajevo has been a host of the POINT conference on new technologies, political accountability and the ICT usage in work of public institutions and organizations of civil society. The conference has been organized by the Association of citizens "Zašto ne", in cooperation with the CRTA from Serbia and the Metamorphosis Foundation from Macedonia.
As it has been stated at the conference, Open Government Data , or proactive publishing of public information in an electronically readable format, is a new paradigm in the world of the public and publicly available information. Open Government Data initiatives and governmental projects of proactive information publishing are happening all around the world. Going from publishing the information on work of institutions, over the information on public spending, procurements to publishing the geographical, infrastructural or meteorological data, the Open Government Data becomes a transparency standard of governments, as well as a requirement of the ever-growing part of the public.
In a frame of this, organized has also been a panel discussion on topic "Open government Data – support or a threat to governments?" which has been attended by a representative of the Public Administration Reform Coordinator’s Office, Dejan Buha. Besides other, he has pointed out that the "open data" principle is one of the expected results of the Public Administration Reform.
"The public administration reform is the ongoing process in Bosnia and Herzegovina. From that aspect, the "open government data" principle is not an activity or an initiative either, but it is one of the reform results/outputs. However, in order to come to such results and a full sense of the data openness principle, we must build a system which will support such principles in a frame of the civil service. In that sense, what we are currently working on is building and strengthening capacities of government institutions, while we insist on a promotion of the manner and a freedom of the information access as well", Buha has said.
Participants of the discussion were also Ermin Zatega, Research Reporter for "Journalism Development Group" in the Research Journalism Centre in Sarajevo, Jasminka Džumhur, Ombudsman for Human Rights in BiH, Srđan Blagovčanin, Executive Director of the Transparency International, Marko Rakar, Director of the Consultancy Company "MRAK services" from Croatia, Helen Darbshire from the Access Info Organization, and Martin Keegan from the "Open Knowledge Foundation" from Great Britain.
More information on conference, program and topics elaborated you can find here.