Making an Inventory of the Datasets Produced by the Ministries and Subordinate Agencies (RO0020)

Making inventories of the datasets produced by the public administration is an essential step in opening public data.
Representatives of both the civil society and of the private sector have stated that they expect the public administration to deliver inventories of datasets, and subsequently, accurate datasets in easy to use formats.
As a result of this commitment, the ministries and their subordinate agencies will create, publish and keep up to date inventories of the datasets they prepare, whether published or unpublished.
In this way, the stakeholders will be able to identify the datasets that are likely to have the greatest economic or social impact, and request they are published with priority.

Commitment 2. Making an Inventory of the Datasets Produced by the Ministries and Subordinate Agencies

Commitment Text:

Making an inventory of the datasets produced by the ministries and subordinate agencies

1.     Develop the open data Guidelines

2.     The ministries and their subordinate agencies will be required to establish and enforce the internal processes needed for: a) identifying all the datasets they generate that could be published in an open format; b) regular assessment and update of the datasets.

3.     The ministries will create inventories of the datasets that may be published in an open format. These lists will include both the datasets generated at the central level (ministry) and those generated by subordinate agencies.

4.     The inventories will be gathered on a single database by the Chancellery of the Prime-Minister and will include the name of the dataset, the agency that covers it, the available format, the proposed date for publishing and the proposed updating frequency. The centralized inventory will be published online on ogp.gov.ro and, based on requests and feedback received from the public through an online form, it should also facilitate the prioritization of the publication of particular datasets.

Responsible institutions: All 17 institutions independently accountable for applying the commitment in their own jurisdiction

Supporting institutions: Chancellery of the Prime Minister, Romanian Open Data Coalition

Start date: September 2014                                      End date: December 2015

Commitment Aim:

This commitment aims to improve access to open data by taking four key steps:

•       Develop open data guidelines,

•       Establish procedures at the ministry level to identify datasets,

•       Create inventories of datasets at the ministry level, and

•       Create a single, centralized database that includes all inventories created at the ministry level.

This commitment builds on activities from previous action plans. The first included a similar commitment (making an inventory of the available open datasets and identifying the most useful data for each government institution). In the second action plan, the government  modified the goals to require ministries to inventory all datasets, thereby increasing transparency. This commitment  encourages more data-based policy making in Romania by offering stakeholders access to economically and socially impactful datasets.

Status

Midterm: Limited

The government had completed and published the open data guidelines in April 2015, after some delay.^{[Note 5: The open data guidelines are available online at http://bit.ly/2hMwtHF. ]} Progress on developing procedures to identify the datasets and regularly update them has been uneven. The government had made more progress on creating inventories of datasets at the ministry level, but it was still struggling at the level of subordinate agencies. For more information, please see the 2014–2015 IRM midterm report.

End of term: Substantial

Based on the government’s self-assessment report, on the IRM’s desk research, and on interviews with officials from the Chancellery of the Prime Minister and civil society representatives, the commitment has been substantially completed. Open data guidelines were already in place at the time of the midterm evaluation.

One of the key activities, establishing procedures and identifying datasets at the ministry level, could not be evaluated directly because this information is not public. However, ministries created inventories and published them online,^{[Note 6: The complete inventory can be found at http://bit.ly/2i6v4iu. Additionally, the uploaded datasets can be accessed, grouped by institutions, at http://data.gov.ro/organization.]} and the self-assessment report confirms that procedures have been developed at the ministry level. Based on the information available, this activity can be considered at least partially completed.

Three-quarters of the ministries (16 out of 21) have begun creating inventories of datasets to be published in open format. However, there are still some unresolved problems. For example, according to interviews with CSO representatives, progress developing data inventories has been uneven across different government agencies and a few have not yet submitted their inventories.^{[Note 7: Ministry of Transport and Ministry of Economy, Commerce, and Relations with the Business Environment.]} Other ministries oversee numerous subordinate agencies, and progress releasing inventories from  all relevant agencies has been uneven. Obstructions to moving forward include overcoming some ministries and subordinate agencies’ culture of secrecy, institutional reluctance to open data, administrative inefficiency, and bureaucratic inertia.

Overall, this commitment successfully established a list of data identification procedures and, to a significant degree, implemented them. Now ministries publish the vast majority of datasets on OGP Romania’s webpage.^{[Note 8: The inventory is available at http://bit.ly/2i6v4iu. ]} The inventory includes 719 datasets from 16 ministries and 59 subordinate agencies. The quality of this new data varies, primarily suffering from a lack of unified standards. Although beyond the scope of this commitment, metadata to easily search and understand the datasets and standardized, machine-readable formats would improve information quality.

Did it open government?

Access to information: Marginal

The main goal of the commitment was to offer stakeholders access to all government datasets in a single, centralized location. By the end of the implementation period, there has been significant progress toward achieving these goals. The government developed open data guidelines, convinced institutions to collaborate in identifying datasets, and created a centralized, public inventory of datasets. Although substantially completed, this commitment and its implementation only marginally opened government with respect to access to information. Citizens and stakeholders now have access to a comprehensive inventory of datasets that are available at the ministry level (via the OGP website), information that was not available before the commitment period. In addition, published inventories can be used to identify gaps in available data and allow stakeholders to pressure specific ministries to make a dataset public. To further stretch government practice, the inventory could be more extensive. In addition, public institutions need to update datasets regularly (this would qualify as a major change in practice), and the government should publish all datasets on the open data portal (this would qualify as outstanding). In addition, migrating the inventory from the OGP website to the open data portal would help centralize information and improve the ease of using these two tools together.  

Carried forward?

The commitment has been included, with some changes, in the 2016–2018 national action plan as commitment 18 in the “open data” cluster. Additionally, these activities are part of a project funded through the European Social Fund 2014–2020, though the scope of the commitment is narrower to improve feasibility.