GOVERNMENT OPEN DATA PORTAL: HOW GOVERNMENT

STRATEGIES SHOULD BE MORE OPEN

Marijana IVANOV
Faculty of Economics & Business, University of Zagreb, Trg J.F. Kennedyja 6, 10000 Zagreb,
Croatia
mivanov@efzg.hr
Mladen VARGA
Faculty of Economics & Business, University of Zagreb, Trg J.F. Kennedyja 6, 10000 Zagreb,
Croatia
mvarga@efzg.hr
Mirjana PEJI BACH
Faculty of Economics & Business, University of Zagreb, Trg J.F. Kennedyja 6, 10000 Zagreb,
Croatia
mpejic@efzg.hr
Abstract:
Open data is information which can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone,
anywhere, at no cost, and for any purpose. Open data policy is a relatively new phenomenon
and is thus in an early stage of development. Since government strategies are issues of
significant public interest, open data policy obtained a special attention in the field of open
government data (OGD). Goal of the paper is to give more insight into following issues: (i)
critics on the low government openness of the government despite the fact on the significant
shift in the openness, (ii) causes of the low score on the data openness of governmental
institutions, (iii) impact of the government reforms to greater confidence of the public and
state institutions creditability, and (iv) selection of the information about public sector that
should be available as open data in terms of the basic definitions and possibilities of their use
in machine-readable format.
Keywords: open data, open government data, transparency, public sector, ICT

Introduction
Number of researchers consider that government data should be public available in order to
increase transparency (Zuiderwijk et al., 2013; Yang et al., 2013), citizen participation and
government efficiency, despite the fact that some debate emerges on this issue (Jansen et al.,
2012). On similar ways as company directors are responsible to the shareholders and to
different group of stakeholders, the government is expected to be accountable to taxpayers.
This relationship can be expressed through the traditional principal/agent model in which
agents take some value (e.g. tax revenues) from the principals, and in return, they are obliged
to report its usage. Thus, accountability in public sector is ... secured by information flows
moving along the same route as resources but in the opposite direction (Watt, 2004).
An improvement of open government policy is a traditional good governance principle that in
recent history gets a new dimension through building the open government portal as
information and communication channels to the public (Ding et al. 2011; van Veenstra et al.,
2013; Nam, 2012). Open government reforms and public available OGD bring tangible
benefits: faster growth, better public services, less corruption and less poverty. Citizens have a
right to know what the government is spending their money on, and need to know what their
government is doing. To do that, they must be able freely to access government data and
information and to share that information with other citizens. ... In a digital age, data is a key
resource for social and commercial activities. ... By opening up data, government can help
drive the creation of innovative business and services that deliver social and commercial
value. ... By opening up data, citizens are enabled to be much more directly informed and
involved in decision-making. This is more than transparency: its about making a full
read/write society, not just about knowing what is happening in the process of governance but
being able to contribute to it (Open Knowledge Foundation, 2014).
Open government reforms ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency,
public participation, and collaboration. They are connected with the citizen right to the
freedom of information, which in many countries is promoted by enacting the legislation
about the free access to information with public interest (Huijboom et al., 2011; Zuiderwijk, et
al., 2012). In Croatia such regulatory framework represents the Act on the Right of Access to
Information (Official Gazette 25/13) that regulates the right of access and re-usage of
information that are kept with the public sector.
From August 20011 Croatian government participate in activities of the Open Government
Partnership (OGP) as a multilateral initiative of 63 countries that promote transparency,
empower citizens and civil society, fight corruption and harness new technologies to
strengthen governance (Open Government Partnership, 2014). As part of the activities of the
OGP, Croatian government adopted a strategy for greater openness of central government
financial data and some progress was also recorded in openness of some local government
financial data, as well as in using the open data strategies to inform citizens about many useful
details and developments in public life and public services. However, in spite of this until
today Croatia recorded the relatively low rank of data openness according to Open Data Index
as well as the poor improvements in implementation of the open government partnership
outlined in the National action plan for period 2012-2013.
Goal of the paper is to shed some light on the following issues that are imposed: Are the
critics exaggerated because the last year was a significant shift in the openness of
government? Are the low score primary result of still low credibility of government

institutions? Does openness of government reforms contribute to greater confidence of the

public and state institutions creditability? Finally, what information about the public sector
should be available as open data in terms of the basic definitions and possibilities of their use
in machine-readable format?

Open data index and open government policy

Open Data Index evaluates the characteristics of some public offered data, including frequent
updating of data and free ability of use and reuse data by anyone, as well as availability of
data in machine-readable formats that allow their processing for scientific research or other
legal purpose. Open Data Index ranks seventy countries based on the availability and
accessibility of information in ten key areas, including government budget, government
spending, election results, transport timetables, pollution etc. In rank order, the highest level
of openness exists in the United Kingdom, in the United States, Denmark, Norway,
Netherlands, Australia, Finland, Sweden, New Zealand and Canada. In comparison to the
United Kingdom with collected 940 points, Croatia recorded only 445 points, what is a
weaker rank than in the case of Bulgaria, Portugal, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Spain or
Greece, but better rank then in case of Japan, Serbia, Hungary, Germany or Slovak Republic
(Open Knowledge Foundation, 2014).

Since the level of data openness is not always correlated with the economic development of
the country, differences point out that governments doubt about the benefits and costs of full
implementation of the open data policy. That can include different opinions about benefits of
providing the open data connected with all particular components of public spending or
providing a number of other contemporary data, including seemingly trivial examples such as
information about the real time position of any tram car in a capital city. The main economic
reasons for the doubt are:
high costs of providing open data (especially many databases in machine-readable
format) due to innovative technical requirements and/or the existence of multiple
government bodies assigned to carry out the publishing of the budgetary documents
and different public sector information;
many citizens are not familiar with concept of open data or have a lack of computer
knowledge to access, understand and/or format open data, so benefits of open data are
seen to be for researchers rather than for public.
Other reasons can be the fear of possible abuse of open data, including speculative attacks or
other actions against certain countries and their citizens. The questions that arise from this
debate are: which government data and public finance data should be opened; which of them
should be in the machine-readable format allowing any user to read, download, copy,
distribute, print, search, index or use by software for scientific research or any other legal
purpose; for which of data is enough that they are accessible as public sector information in
any form of publishing (Peled, 2011; McDermott, 2010; Nilsen, 2010).
Additionally, there is no consensus about: Is open data a good idea for the open government
partnership? Namely, the overemphasized idea of transparency and the availability of
numerous open data may divert public attention from other issues such as the financing of

political parties in the country. Should really every detail of government and public finance
data be publicly available as open data in machine-readable format, especially in the case of
countries with lower income where the opportunity costs may be massive, while the public
may not have any interest or enough knowledge to use the available databases?
On the other hand following the Open Government Partnership UK National Action Plan
2013 to 2015, open government establishes a platform for independent and collaborative
action by citizens, civil society, private companies and public servants. Transparency,
participation and accountability provide the essential foundation for economic, social and
political progress by increasing the openness of institutions and public processes while
maintaining and respecting the privacy of individuals... (Opengovernment.org.uk, 2013).
According to the first sentence on data.gov.uk - as the world famous open government data
portal, the UK is leading the world on open data. The web portal was launched in 2010 to
help people understand how government works and how policies are made
Opengovernment.org.uk, 2013). The available open data include more than 10,300 data files,
and the most of them are in the machine-readable format covering different subject areas,
including:

data about the inner workings of government and how it is structured, how to get in
contact with senior officials and how much they are paid;

open data for over 140 local authorities, including information on 163 councils, 12,182
councillors, 7,525 committees, 108,883 committee meetings, 668 hyper local sites, 61,237
documents, over 270,956 pieces of data and 2,368,794 financial transactions;

government interrogating spending tool, including financial accounting information for

public reporting around the particular department spending and aggregate level across
government;

for central government expenditure details of all spending with suppliers over 25,000
for every government department, details of all senior staff salaries along with
departmental organograms and details of all spending contracts;
for local government - details of all spending with suppliers in excess of 500, details of
senior staff salaries and all spending contracts;
how much and for which purpose the UK invests in developing countries;

the legislation that the UK parliament has passed since 1267 with amendments to
legislation over the years;

the voting history of Members of Parliament with debates theyve taken part in, how they
voted, sign up for an email alert;

how the country is managing its natural resources to help prevent corruption and conflict;

data in function to improve business competitive advantage, reduce costs, better target
potential customers, to find potential business partners or easy way to import or export
goods;

data about economic and social growth;

information on 55 million companies across the world, improving knowledge for investors
and others wanting to undertake audit and due diligence work (site also collaborates with
the World Bank to reduce opportunities for complex company structures to be used to
evade tax and other obligations);

the Guardian GCSE schools guide designed to help parents to find, research and compare
local schools in England;

information about the buses in local-user area including local stops, timetables, live
expected times of arrival for some bus stops, service updates, specific routes, as well as
what other bus-users are saying;

data that help to find a parking space or evade road works;

how much crime happens on some street and where traffic accidents are likely to happen;

the best places to live in the UK with data about housing, transport, crime and schools;

how clean the water is on local beach, etc.

Publishing a lot of ODG, the UK government is working closely with businesses and
charities to identify new public data to release ... helping to improve peoples lives and boost
economic growth (Opengovernment.org.uk, 2013). The UK was one of eight founding
countries of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) as multilateral initiative of today 63
countries that promote transparency, empower citizens and civil society, fight corruption and
harness new technologies to strengthen governance. In its activities, the UK is committed to
five key themes of OGP including:
open data radically opening up government data for greater accountability, public
service improvement and economic growth
government integrity fighting corruption and strengthening democracy through
transparent government
fiscal transparency helping citizens to follow the money
empowering citizens transforming the relationship between citizens and
governments
natural resource transparency ensuring natural resources and extractive revenues are
used for public benefit.
On the other hand, the UK has often been criticized for excessive focus on open data (due to
possible conflict with the rights of individuals) which refers to the last national action plan for
2013-15 noting that open government is much more than open data.

Public sector information and open government partnership in Croatia

Croatia officially began participating in the Open Government Partnership (OGP) in August
2011, when the Republic of Croatia declared the countrys intent to join. For this purpose, the
Government of the Republic of Croatia made the Action plan for 2012-13, which includes 9
priority measures and 34 implementing activities to increase the open government partnership
in four priority areas:
A. Fiscal transparency
1. Improving the content and transparency of budgetary documents
2. Improving transparency of business activity of the companies of special state
interest
3. Make contents of all budgetary documents understandable and accessible to
citizens
4. Improving accessibility of local budget contents to the citizens and the public
B. Access to information
5. Improving the legislative framework for exercising the right of access to
information
6. Improving access to information on expending public resources and contents of
relevant registers
C. Use of information technologies
7. Ensuring transparent work of public authority bodies in the service of exercising
citizen rights
D. Citizen and civil society participation
8. Setting up a system of participatory drafting and monitoring of state and local
budget implementation
9. Improving the practice of consulting the interested public in procedures of
adopting new laws
Currently there is no official list of all of the open data in Croatia available for its citizens.
One possible way for estimating data openness in Croatia is usage of Open Knowledge
Foundation framework that covers following areas of communication: Transport timetables,
Government Budget, Government Spending, Election Results, Company Register, National
map, National Statistics, Legislation, Postcodes/Zipcodes, and Emissions of pollutants. Open
Data Index is a result of the Open Data Census project that has been launched in order to
estimate the level on the state of open data in world-wide countries, in order to boost
discussion among governments and its citizens. Such a project can give provide elaborate
platform for social activists to negotiate on urgent need for open data in different areas.
Tables 1 present government openness on above mentioned areas. Here we present the
estimate provided by the experts as part of the Open Knowledge Foundation initiative.
However, we provided our own comments (in brackets) in order to shed additional light on
different areas of data openness. In some of the cases, our estimates are different compared to
the estimates of experts that provided the data to the Open Knowledge Foundation for Croatia.
Transport timetables
First, data on transport timetables are provided for Croatian case only for the railway
transport. In addition, different transport timetables should be taken into account: buses,
airplanes and water transport. Also, national, transnational and local transport timetables
should be considered. Authors estimate is that transport timetables are available in Croatia for
all of those transport forms, but it is provided in different formats, e.g. html, docx, excel,
databases, xml. In addition, such timetables are not correct in some cases, either because of
different problems in traffic that emerge from time to time (e.g. weather conditions), and in
other cases just because they are out of date. Timetables are dispersed on the number of

websites, usually websites of the transportation companies. Also, information is mostly in

Croatian.
Government budget
Government budget is presented at the website of Ministry of finance, and it is available in
XLS format for each of the budget years, together with reports available in PDF forms.
Government budget is administered by the State Treasury that carries out business affairs
regarding: (i) budget preparation and consolidation, (ii) budget execution, (iii) state
accounting, (iv) public debt management, and (iv) the affairs of financial management of
European Union aid funds through the National fund. Data on government budget is, to our
estimate, open to high extent.
Government spending
Open government strategies are formally fulfilled in the terms of reporting to the public.
However, there is no one major web portal that would allow users to access the all public
sector information including financial open government data. For example, over the site of the
Croatian Government is possible access to the register of state property (including real estate
and stocks and shares of companies in which the state has partial ownership). It is also
possible to access the Mojauprava portal as the central portal of public administration in
Croatia. At the site of the Government there are available chronologies of activities of the
Government, the conclusions of numerous meetings, statements of members of government,
notification of the public in the last year, the partial activities of public procurement by
ministries etc. However, records of investments are available only to registered users.
According to information of web site, the right of access to information and reuse of
information is achieved by submitting a request to the Croatian Government, while the
Croatian Government is entitled to reimbursement of actual costs incurred arising from the
provision of information to the user access to information and re-use of information, as well
as reimbursement of costs to provide the requested information.
Election results
Election results are presented at the website http://www.izbor.hr. Data is available in digital
form, it is publicly available, free of charge, and it is machine readable, licensed and up-todate. However, there is no direct link to election results, and it takes number of clicks to
access the relevant data. In addition, data is presented as graphs, which is visually attractive,
but not suitable for statistical analysis. Data can be converted to HTML format, but it again
has to be copy pasted in some program in order to prepare it for analysis.
Company register
Company register is available at the website: https://sudreg.pravosudje.hr/ It is possible to
search companies registered in Croatia according to some of the companies characteristics,
e.g. VAT number, and the name of the company. However, it is not possible to search the
companies according to the owners name, which would be very interesting function that
would contribute significantly to the transparency in Croatia. Therefore, this data shows high
level of openness, however, with not complete transparency.
Table 1: Government data openness of Croatia on transport, government budget, government
spending, election results and company register
Transport
Government Government Election
Company
timetables
Budget
Spending
Results
Register
Does the
+
+
+
+

data exist?

Is it in
digital
form?
Is it
publicly
available?
Is it free of
charge?

Is it online?
Is it
machine
readable?
Available in
bulk?
Is it up to
date?

(yes)
+
(yes, in most of
the cases, but in
different
formats)

(yes)

(yes)

(yes)

+
(yes, in xls
and PDF
format)

(yes)
(yes, but not
always
publicly
available)

+
(yes, in
HTML)

+
(yes)

+
(yes)
+
(yes)
+
(yes, in most of
the cases)

+
(yes)
+
(yes)

(N/A)
(N/A)

+
(yes)

(N/A)

+
(yes)
+
(yes)
+
(yes)

(yes)
(no)
(partially)

+
(yes)
(no)
+
(yes)

(N/A)
(N/A)
(N/A)

+
(yes)
(no)
+
(yes)

+
(yes)
+
(yes)
+
(yes)
+
(yes)
(no)
(N/A)

Source: Open data index, available at: http://national.census.okfn.org/; author estimate

Discussion and conclusion

Goal of the paper was to give more insight into number of issues regarding Croatian
government practices on open data initiative. Based on the above discussion, we shall provide
our opinion on the selected topics.
I. Low government openness
Croatian citizens have the opportunity to access a number of current public sector
information, but the problem is that information are still distributed by various information
channels, government bodies and institutions in the sometime, so it is difficult to get a
profound insight. Data are available in pdf, world, ppt and similar formats and they are
partially divided by the share various documents so that it is impossible to keep track of timeseries data and use them to direct statistical analysis for the purpose of scientific or other
research. Since Croatia relatively recently joined the project of the open government
partnership, data are often available only for recent period or only one year of reporting.
Therefore, clear policy on data presentation format should be used. Great example of unified
data format is Eurostat database that is available in unified format and searchable according to
different criteria.
II. Causes of the low score on the data openness
Despite the relatively poor performance in terms of promoting open government partnership
in Croatia, the fact that Croatia is participating in the OGP project activity is the important
step towards greater openness and transparency. However, all of this is still very far from the
idea of a real open government partnership and especially very far from the actual idea of

open government data in the technical sense of the possibilities of their freely used, reused
and redistributed by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose. Two main causes are present for such
state. First reason is that the notion of data openness has emerged recently, and it takes some
time to finish the projects that would increase the availability of open data. Second reason is
that open data emerge on different platforms, in different formats and are prepared by the
different subjects. Therefore, should we consider the government open data as one big data
integrated project? In other words, should we aim towards the goal of Government Integrated
Information System?
III. Impact of the government reforms to greater confidence and state institutions credibility
According to the Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) Progress Report 2012-2013
Croatia formally filled completely only two commitments from the Action plan including two
points. First point is transparency of business activity of the companies of special state
interest but the reports have been regularly published for more than a decade, and the
inclusion of this activity into the OGP Action Plan did not bring significant new improvement
in the area of open government (Open Government Partnership, 2014a). Second point is
accessibility of local budget contents to the citizens and the public but in spite of Ministry of
Finances recommendations and instructions on publishing key budgetary documents for local
and regional self-government (standardized format for citizens guidebooks), many
municipalities still had little or no access to the guidebooks (Open Government Partnership,
2014a).
IV. Selection of the information about public sector that should be available as open data
Action plan for 2012-2013 included 9 priority measures and 34 implementing activities to
increase the open government partnership in four priority areas: fiscal transparency, access to
information, use of information technologies, and citizen and civil society participation.
According to the estimate on data openness in Croatia, provided by the Open data index, there
is still a long way to reaching these goals. Currently, Croatia is in the process of accepting
new Action plan for 2014-2016. In addition, Croatian Post and Telecommunication Agency
has published in March, 2014 an open call for development of the portal for access to public
sector information (data.gov.hr), that should enable access to public sector data, all with the
aim to improve public services, intensify the cooperation between the bodies of public
authority and the private sector and increase the transparency of the public authority
(www.hakom.hr). However, number of civil society initiatives is available on the Web, and
also Croatia should entice such initiatives, since they initiate discussion. One example is
https://vjetrenjaca.org/ In addition; independent researchers publish information that connects
open data already available at the web. One example is the calculation of municipality
spending per capita based on the data provided on Croatian Bureau of Statistics and Ministry
of finance (Hatzivelkos, 2014). Therefore, action plan for the open government should not
only lead towards more open data, but such data should be in machine reading formats, that
could be easily traced and compared. Also, civil society and citizens should be encouraged to
make new analysis and thus initiate discussion and change towards more open society.

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