[open-government] A lot of new Russian news and open government projects

Tue Mar 12 21:49:26 UTC 2013

Thanks a lot, Ivan!

Do you by chance have an English version of any of the relevant
regulations? I would particularly be interested in campaign and party
finance legislation.

Can you also tell us more about the NGOs who use these datasets - election
results and government contracts?

Keep up with the good work,
Julia

On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 11:26 AM, Ivan Begtin <ibegtin at gmail.com> wrote:

> Julia,
>     each dataset has it's specific issues - I will try to describe all of
> them.
>
> *Campaign and elections finances data* - available as PDF reports at
> Russian Election comission website. It's mostly irrelevant and most people
> don't trust it much. We have too large shadow economy here in Russia and it
> helps to avoid campaign financing limitations.
>
> *Election results* - available as HTML reports. These results effectively
> parsed by many NGOs and activists here in Russia, but we don't have any
> machine-readable data from government yet. NGO's that used this data (it's
> GOLOS and few others) are under government pressure since new Russian laws
> are very strict about  financing of NGO from foreign sources.
>
> *Government contracts* - completely available for free as machine
> readable opendata. It's huge, good and complete dataset about 200-300 GB
> uncompressed. This data is very actively reused by business and
> anti-corruption NGO's.
>
> *Asset disclosures* - most of government agencies publish this data as
> DOC, PDF and rarely as XLS files. So it's 1-star or 2-star data not better.
> We have ongoing discussion how to organize this data machine readable and
> to create all-Russia asset disclosure government website. I can't say that
> Russian officials at middle level like this idea, but I think that it could
> be implemented as political decision. And sure we have a few NGO projects
> that parse unstructured data (like Scraperwiki project does) and creates
> civil society asset disclosure websites. One such project I made 2 years
> ago. It's calls - www.publicprofit.ru another one made by  Transparency
> Int. Russia and it's called Declarator.
>
> Other datasets are also available - we keep watching all of them. We
> helped to complete Russian part of open data census -
> http://census.okfn.org
>
>
> Best Regards,
>   Ivan Begtin
>
>
>
> 2013/3/7 Julia Keserű <jkeseru at sunlightfoundation.com>
>
>> Ivan, this is great, thanks for letting us know!
>>
>> Could you give us a bit more detail on politically relevant datasets and
>> their disclosure policy, if any? (Campaign and finance data, election
>> results, government contracts, asset disclosures, etc.)
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Julia Keseru
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 10:16 AM, Andrew Stott <andrew.stott at dirdigeng.com
>> > wrote:
>>
>>> Ivan****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> Thanks for this further information.  I had been struck by the same
>>> point as Daniel.****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> There are some links which suggest that some government information is
>>> already being released on an “open” basis (and in a few cases Creative
>>> Commons licences are being used) – is that right?  The licence for the
>>> President’s own website [1] looks as though it is in the right direction
>>> too (although it could be more explicit in some areas, such as whether
>>> “reproduction” includes derivatives).****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> [1] http://eng.kremlin.ru/about/copyrights****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> It’s not unusual at the start of an open data initiative to find that
>>> governments already make information available for non-commercial uses –
>>> often that is actually useful in that it establishes that there is no
>>> difficulty in principle about releasing the information into the public
>>> domain.  In my experience earlier limitations on commercial uses often have
>>> come from an early official cautiousness and a wish to proceed on a case by
>>> case basis – before the benefits of Open Data were understood.   ****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> I’ve tried (with the help of Google Translate) to understand some of the
>>> links about Creative Commons licences and their compatibility with the
>>> Russian Civil Code, but I’m afraid that I did not really comprehend it.  In
>>> particularly it was not clear to me whether there were particular issues
>>> with the way Creative Commons works (the Voynikanis study also reports
>>> earlier issues with French and German law) or whether there is a more
>>> fundamental problem with making intellectual property “open”.  I’d be
>>> grateful for any pointers.****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> Regards****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> Andrew Stott ****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> *From:* open-government-bounces at lists.okfn.org [mailto:
>>> open-government-bounces at lists.okfn.org] *On Behalf Of *Ivan Begtin
>>> *Sent:* 05 March 2013 09:16
>>> *To:* Daniel Dietrich
>>> *Cc:* Open Government WG List
>>> *Subject:* Re: [open-government] A lot of new Russian news and open
>>> government projects****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> Hi Daniel.****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> Sure that's what we do and russian NGO dedicated to freedom of
>>> information help us. Just it's not so easy to do. We have some articles of
>>> Russian Civil Code that oppose Creative Commons. Some explanations here -
>>> http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Russia****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> Since this problem is not yet solved we don't have any data provided
>>> under open licenses like Creative Commons or ODbL.****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> Right now we have some limitations for government geodata - it's
>>> provided only for non-commercial usage. ****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> But we hope to find solution and to promote Creative Commons and other
>>> open licenses here in Russia.****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> Best Regards,****
>>>
>>>    Ivan Begtin****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> 2013/3/5 Daniel Dietrich <daniel.dietrich at okfn.org>****
>>>
>>> Thanks for sharing, Ivan! This looks very promising. Could you perhaps
>>> explain a little more on****
>>>
>>>
>>> > "1. Open licenses are not adopted yet and do not conform russian law"
>>>
>>> ****
>>>
>>> Do you have some examples for open and non-open licensing of gov data in
>>> Russia? Maybe its worth contacting the people in charge? Thanks!
>>>
>>> Daniel****
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 3 Mar 2013, at 18:54, Ivan Begtin <ibegtin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> > Dear all,
>>> >
>>> > last year here in Russia we actively promoted open data and open
>>> government initiatives, started new projects and right now we see and
>>> review a lot of open government projects lauched by government agencies.
>>> >
>>> > Unfortunately most of these projects are only in Russian so I suggest
>>> to use tools like Google Translate to get more information.
>>> >
>>> > First of all we launched 2 new CKAN based open data catalogs:
>>> > - OpenData Hub - http://hub.opengovdata. We moved all datasets from
>>> our OpenGovData.ru website to the CKAN based repository. Also we loaded a
>>> lot of new data and
>>> > - Open police data - http://data.openpolice.ru - it's special data
>>> hub with crime statistics, police organizations, police budget and so on.
>>> It's part of OpenPolice project - http://www.openpolice.ru
>>> >
>>> > At the same time russian government agencies also started publishing
>>> open data and new projects appeared not so long ago:
>>> > - Moscow city administration open data portal - http://data.mos.ru -
>>> announced 3 weeks ago. It has about 140 public datasets. Most datasets are
>>> geodata.
>>> > - Open data "promotion website" - http://opendata.bigovernment.ruit's part of russian federal government initiative "Open Government and
>>> right now it includes documents, ideas, cases and other topics related to
>>> the opendata
>>> >
>>> > And even more! Last week Russian Ministry of Finances announced
>>> http://budget.gov.ru  - all-Russia open budget / open spending portal.
>>> it provides a lot of information about russian budgeting system, provides
>>> open data about budgets and other budget and spending information.
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > Also we have ongoing process of publishing open data by Russian
>>> federal government agencies. As it's planned we will have not less then 500
>>> valueable datasets published till 13 july 2013.
>>> > It's one of the goals for newly established Open data council under
>>> Government Commision for "Open Government".
>>> >
>>> > Me and other co-founders of our NGO "Informational Culture" are
>>> members of this council and we keep promoting open data principles.
>>> >
>>> > Sure we still have a lot of issues like:
>>> > 1. Open licenses are not adopted yet and do not conform russian law
>>> > 2. Not so many political open data available (like election results,
>>> campaign finances and so on)
>>> > 3. Hard to get census data - Russian statistics agency is very far
>>> from openness.
>>> > 4. We don't have much information about our projects in English so we
>>> are quite isolated. Sure we read a lot about all open data projects around
>>> the world, but not so much about Russian projects known outside of Russia.
>>> >
>>> > But future is brighter now.
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > --
>>> > Best Regards,
>>> >    Ivan Begtin
>>> >
>>> > Director of NGO "Informational Culture"
>>> > email: ibegtin at infoculture.ru
>>> > phone: +7 499 500 96 58, +7 910 426 68 83
>>> > website: http://infoculture.ru****
>>>
>>> > _______________________________________________
>>> > open-government mailing list
>>> > open-government at lists.okfn.org
>>> > http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-government
>>> > Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/open-government****
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> -- ****
>>>
>>> С уважением,****
>>>
>>>   Иван Бегтин****
>>>
>>> ** **
>>>
>>> Директор НП "Информационная культура"****
>>>
>>> email: ibegtin at infoculture.ru****
>>>
>>> phone: +7 499 500 96 58, +7 910 426 68 83****
>>>
>>> website: http://infoculture.ru****
>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Júlia Keserű
>> International Program Coordinator
>>
>> 1818 N Street NW, Suite 300
>> Washington, DC 20036
>>
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> С уважением,
>   Иван Бегтин
>
> Директор НП "Информационная культура"
> email: ibegtin at infoculture.ru
> phone: +7 499 500 96 58, +7 910 426 68 83
> website: http://infoculture.ru
>

-- 
Júlia Keserű
International Program Coordinator

1818 N Street NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036

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