Moldova
Victoria Vlad is working as an Economist for the Moldovan NGO and independent thinktank, EXPERT-GRUP. Victoria previously analyzed the education and health sectors and coordinated communications for BudgetStories.md, an open budgets and data visualization project. Currently, she is coordinating a national project in education, which aims to build social accountability for the education reforms in Moldova.
Moldova, Republic of ranked #43 in the 2014 Open Data Index / Other stories from Europe
Two years ago, in November 2012, at a OpenSpending Workshop on Budget Monitoring in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, I first learned about the Open Knowledge Foundation and its many innovative projects. Since then, I have been involved with Open Spending where I have worked with the platform to add some data for Moldova, and also visualized some of the datasets for BudgetStories.md and ScoalaMea.md. Last year, I had the chance to participate at the OKCon2013 with a speech at the OpenSpending and Finances panel. Also, last year, at the invitation of Christian Villum, I participated in completing the Open Data Census for the Republic of Moldova.
The Open Data Index has several advantages: It is easily accessible for everyone; It is crowd-sourced, which brings together so many people from around the world to work on it for every country; It puts things in perspective and shows where there is work to be done in order to improve a country’s ranking; It’s beautifully displayed;
Last year’s assessment helped Moldova’s authorities (including the E-Government Center) to focus on passing an important legislation - the Law on public sector information (PSI) re-use. Therefore, this year, Moldova improved in regards to openly licensed data. We are looking forward the final results of the reviewing process of the Global Open Data Index to see where Moldova will be placed this year, compared to last year’s ranking of 12th place.
There is still work to be done, in order to improve the quality of data for the National Map, Election Results and Emission of Pollutants data, and overall, the quality of information provided to the public.
