The British Embassy was delighted to support an open data hackathon organised in Bucharest on 21-22 February. The event was organised by the Coalition for Open Data and the Romanian Government, in partnership with the British Embassy, the US Embassy and the Dutch Embassy. It followed a successful conference organised on Friday 20 February, where the importance of open data for Romania was debated.
More than 70 programmers and civil society activists gathered over the weekend at the Academy for Economic Studies to show that open data can be used innovatively in Romania as well to the benefit of the wider public. Romania has registered significant progress with opening up its data over the past two years but many public institutions are still reluctant to share their information. For instance, 249 data sets have been published on the Romanian open data portal as compared to 24,000 data sets currently available on data.gov.uk.
Although much more data needs to be opened up, 17 projects of opening, cleansing and re-using data were put forward over a whole weekend. Out of these, three initiatives were awarded by a jury. The first one was a map of NGOs in Romania, with data provided by the Ministry of Justice. The second one regarded the development of a postal codes map in Romania, which is currently missing. The third application data from the Statistics Institute and the Cadastre Agency to build a map of depopulated places in Romania. These apps will be made available to the public after several weeks of testing and refining.
Antonio Acuna, head of data.gov.uk, has also joined the hackathon on Saturday morning, to provide inspiration to the group of open data enthusiasts and share some insights into the UK performance on open data. The experience of the open data conference and hackathon showed that UK remains one of Romania’s most trusted partners on transparency issues and open data. We hope this will bear fruit in the future.