Last week an educational video "Analyze Rada! Code for the community!" was launched by the Civil Network OPORA to inform the citizens about new opportunities and data available on the Open Data Portal of the Ukrainian Parliament. This video presents in a very concise and effective way the progress in data opening made by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine with UNDP support.

 

 

 

 

UNDP support to parliamentary openness started in autumn 2015 when CN OPORA initiated a project on developing the open data portal of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. It was first launched in December last year as the Open Data Service on the official parliament's website. A few months later, the Ukrainian Parliament endorsed the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, and during the signing ceremony an Open Parliament Action Plan was approved to implement the Declaration and a working group was set up to coordinate and implement the Plan. This working group, named the Parliamentary Monitoring Committee, presented its first report to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine in May 2016. The Committee reported some major progress in establishing a mechanism of publishing MPs' inquiries and responses to them on the VRU website; developing a mechanism for publishing MPs' appeals; providing special rooms at the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine for persons who requested public information to work with documents; publishing a staffing table of the Verkhovna Rada's Secretariat and, partially, the financial information; developing a web-resource for people to monitor how the MPs vote; and many more (full text of the report here). Developing an Open Data Portal of VRU was one of the important work directions under this action plan.

 

As of today, the Open Data Portal of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine contains in a well structured form more than 400 sets of basic public data on parliamentary legislation and other issues related to the parliamentary activities. The portal contains contains the following information:

 

• Data about staff members of the Administrative Office of the Verkhovna Rada (organizational structure);
• Information about the expenses of the Parliament and Members of Parliament (financial information);
• Database of the legislation (legislative framework);
• Draft laws under consideration (Draft laws);
• Progress of plenary sessions (Plenary sessions);
• Information about the MPs (MPs of Ukraine).

 

Based on this data, civic activists and jornalists may create analytical tools and carry out investigations on the work of the Parliament. In order to encourage active usage of parliamentary data by journalists, analysts and IT specialists for higher transparency and accountability of the Verkhovna Rada, the Civil Network OPORA with UNDP support organized a workshop "Analize Rada, the code to the community".

 

Please check out the portal at opendata.rada.gov.ua or watch the video to know more about the data opening by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine.

 

This initiative is implemented under the framework of Democratization, Human Rights and Civil Society Development Programme in Ukraine, implemented by UNDP and funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark.