Israel
Mor Rubinstein is an Israeli open data geek living in Oxford, UK. During the day Mor works as the Global Open Data Index Community Outreach Coordinator at Open Knowledge. In her spare time she also volunteers at the [Public Knowledge Workshop](http://www.hasadna.org.il/en/) (Also known as "Hasadna"), an Israeli open data technology NGO which builds applications to make data available to Israeli citizens, and the place where she started her first steps in Open Data.
Israel ranked #40 in the 2014 Open Data Index / Other stories from Middle East
For the second year in a row, the Global Open Data Index caught us up in the midst of the Jewish holiday season. Luckily, we had the Public Knowledge Workshop (AKA Hasadna) Hackathon coming up after all of the high holidays, which allowed two of our finest volunteers, Ido Ivri and Noam Castel to spend some quality time with the Index and to submit updates to it. However, the work did not take too long. This is not because the Index is an easy task, it’s actually quite complicated. The main reason was that almost nothing has actually changed in between 2013 to 2014, and in the few cases something did change, it actually changed for the worse…
As the days went by, Hasadna members were watching somberly how Israel is going downhill all the way from rank #24 to somewhere in the bottom of the to 30s. This doesn’t surprise us, but it allows us, for the first time, to have a clear look at what we are standing against. Two years ago, we had a dedicated Government Minister to the subject of open data, a national CIO whom we had a constant dialogue with, and an OGP program with milestones that were supposed to help us to become a more open, transparent and accountable state. As the government changed we lost the dedicated Minister, the CIO resigned and no one replaced her, and the OGP proposal is literally stuck. We have some progress with FOIA, but even government spending is still under a long FOI request that only helped to cover less than 20% of all Ministries.
What will we take from the Index results as civil society? First of all, the way in which government websites are offering data in is horrible. We need more machine readable data available to us for reuse, and less by “on demand” mechanisms, and more by regular updates. This brings us to the second action - licenses. In order for us to re-use the data as civil society, and even more so, in order to fulfill the economic potential of open data, we need clear and open licensing to all government data. The current situation, when NONE of the government offices is offering such a license, is hindering our ability to make good of open data. Advocating for the importance of licensing might help us to achieve an even higher goal than transparency alone; not only will the data will be open, it can actually create economic value, generate revenue, and new use cases that will serve as examples to how opening data is beneficial to Israeli Society.
For the time being, we have to see how we can use the Index as a tool to promote our goal to a more open Israel. Hopefully, we will see some more green and less red in the results next year.