Skopje, January 24th, 2019
The Minister of Information Society and Administration, Damjan Manchevski, participated in the debate titled “Perspectives of Investigative Journalism”.
Minister Manchevski spoke on the panel session titled: “Do Open Databases Contribute to Improvement of Investigative Journalism?“, focusing on the new open data portal.
“A month has passed since we promoted the open data portal and, today, we could say that the number of published data sets is continuously increasing each day. At present, 148 data sets from 42 organizations are available. This number is nowhere near sufficient for us to be able to say that the job is done, but that could never happen. All new data created by institutions should be published on the portal, thereby increasing use thereof”, noted Minister Manchevski, discussing challenges the Government faces when changing the work culture in public institutions. Officials must be aware that information and data available to institutions actually belong to citizens. As he stated, the pressure from journalists in this process is more effective than that of any strategy or document adopted by the Government.
In terms of possibilities open data offer for improvement of investigative journalism, the minister said:
“Of course, journalists are also users of the portal and their work will greatly benefit therefrom, particularly in the area of investigative journalism. The role of journalists to build democratic capacities of a country by means of informing citizens is of utmost importance. Easy access to all data created by institutions, through the open data portal streamlines their operation. This, in turn, allows citizens as end-users to be timely and fully informed on all developments in the country. They would receive information on how their money are spent, prices of agriculture products and byers and exporters thereof, insight in cadastre plans, registers of medicines and doctors, reports on passenger flow, traffic accidents and factors, suicides, finance reports, signed IPARD contracts, number of registered vehicles…and many other data that could be used for further analysis“.
At national and local level, various state institutions provide many services that are often ignored, undermined or inadequately presented. By increasing visibility and transparency, citizens would understand and recognize the value and importance of data created by institutions.
“The open data portal is a living matter and the number of institutions and data therein will constantly increase. With that in mind, I would like to say that each and every one of you can share remarks and comments by means of a simple registration process. More importantly, the portal could be used to request publication of unpublished information. That means that every citizen, every journalist, could request publication of a specific data on the portal. This opportunity for interaction allows everybody to be part of the process and to jointly make this portal a tool that would benefit all“, said Minister Manchevski.
The debate was organized by the Center for Civil Communications, BIRN and NGO Infocenter.
Ministry of Information Society and Administration