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Dear ladies and gentlemen,

public organizations collect and manage large amounts of data during their day-to-day operations. Making this data available for future reuse – where possible due to potential confidentiality – brings about a number of benefits, because of the possibility of adding value, creation of new services for citizens, as well as increasing the transparency of public administration. It is the goal to make data available publicly, in machine-readable form, with minimal restrictions – this is the OpenData approach.

A lot of data is already available, e.g. through the central register of contracts, register of accounts, business register or other datasets published at the Open Data Portal.

In order to find out what data is most interesting to you – the public, the business sector, non-profit organizations, public institutions, local government – the Office of the Plenipotentiary of the Slovak Government for the Development of the Civil Society in cooperation with the National Agency for Network and Electronic Services (NASES) are opening this public consultation.

We would like to ask you to join this consultation and answer the following types of questions:

• What data processed by Slovak public authorities do you consider important to publish?
• Is it necessary to improve the way some data is published?
• What data is necessary for you, your activities and your business?
• Do you have data which you would like to make available to others in open formats?
• Are there other ways in which you would like to contribute to the Open Data ecosystem?

Please send us your answers using this electronic form: http://bit.ly/consultation2015  (click here to display).

This public consultation will remain open until March 17, 2015. Its results will be published on the web sites of our organizations (ÚSVROS, NASES) and will be used to support the commitments of Slovakia’s Open Government Partnership Action Plan for 2015. The text of your replies will be published and you will have the option to decide whether your name and identification of organization will be displayed or hidden. We will inform the public organizations about the result in order to take steps leading to priority publishing of the most frequently requested data.

Our organizations (Office of the Plenipotentiary and NASES) are intensifying Open Data activities by working on several projects:

• administering the catalog of public administration datasets, along with the publishing schedule.
• operation of open data.gov.sk portal and improving its functionality,
• creation of central publishing components for Open Data in the eDemocracy and Open Government project,
• updating legislation that will simplify public access to public administration data,
• COMSODE international project, which creates tools and methodologies for publishing open data,
• communication with administrators of open data, in order to make this data publicly available.

We encourage you to share information about this public consultation with those who may be interested – companies, non-profit organizations, as well as central and local government (the government is not just the „producer“ of data but also important user) and other interested parties. This public consultation is carried out by Jan Gondol (Jan.Gondol@minv.sk) and Lubor Illek (Lubor.Illek@nases.gov.sk), who will also be pleased to answer any further questions.

If you are interested in Open Data, we invite you to participate in formal and informal activities trhough our organizations or others with whom we are in contact (eg. OpenData.sk Facebook group ans well as OpenData Meetups in Bratislava).

Sincerely, Martin Giertl, Plenipotentiary of the Slovak Government for the Development of the Civil Society (ÚSVROS)
Rastislav Janota, Director General, National Agency for Network and Electronic Services (NASES)

This page is hosted on Github. To verify the authenticity of this information, see the official web sites of the respective organizations (.gov.sk domain, pages in Slovak): ÚSVROS (1, 2), NASES.