Rosstat promises to open, but not free

Since I am a member of the Open Data Council under the Government Commission, I regularly attend a large number of events on data openness and openness in general.

I can’t boast that there is a lot of interesting things, most often it’s a lot of conversations in a language far from ordinary people, but such work on “lobbying for openness” is also needed.

And today was literally filled with such events. I happened to be in the morning at the Rosstat Public Council, at a meeting of which Rosstat employees called me. And in the evening at the Open Data Council.

I’ll write about the Council separately, but about Rosstat right now.

As always, there is two news - good and bad.

So the good news .

Rosstat understands best of all what open data is and data in general they also understand very well. They immediately understood what the Semantic Web, SPARQL, Linked Data, and other terms frightening other officials are. They very well understand what needs to be done so that the data is converted to machine-readable and brought to the associated data.

In terms of understanding - they are absolute leaders. It's just that they are the first who understands so well, surprisingly.

But there is some bad news .


It lies in the fact that they are ready to make any efforts only if there is funding. At the same time, they promise to open all their bases, indicators of municipalities and all-all-all. But only so that it is all funded from the budget.

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What we will do is not yet clear. Their position is at least honest than those departments that simply stubbornly resist the publication of anything, for example, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but are still not good at all.

Since for some reason I was invited to join the Public Council under the Federal State Statistics Service, I will try to ensure that the data is opened regardless of whether they give them funding or not.

I do not have their presentations, but there is a document with a plan for publishing data for those who are interested.