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The System for Public Procurements Research, a web application for reporting about the services of catering facilities in Macedonia, data about direct payments in agriculture, and a database of results from the monitoring of the judiciary in Macedonia in one decade. These are the four open data projects that were selected for receiving support after the Competition for support of open data projects, announced by the Metamorphosis Foundation.

Twelve civil society organizations applied at the competition with twelve project ideas and four of them were selected to receive funding: “ICT for changes”, “All for Fair Trials” Coalition, ZIP Institute and the Rural Development Network of the Republic of Macedonia.

“ICT for changes” from Tetovo will work on the project called “Data journalism – System for research based on public procurements in the Republic of Macedonia”. They proposed to collect the data from the electronic procurements system which is publicly available, to organize this data and present it in a way that will be useful for the journalists in Macedonia.

The Rural Development Network (RDN) from Skopje proposed a project idea about “Real development of the rural areas and agriculture”. They will collect data from the National program – direct payments in agriculture and the IPA-IPARD projects in Macedonia.

The ZIP Institute from Skopje intends to create a web application called “Rate.me – System for reporting on the services of catering facilities.” The purpose is to collect the positive and negative practices of catering facilities in Macedonia, where food and drinks are served. They need data on the issued permits for catering facilities, the categories to which they belong, such as nightclubs, bars, discos, etc. They also want to include data for the penalties for catering facilities and the incidents that occurred at these places, including violations of the legal norms.

The Coalition of Citizens’ Associations – “All for Fair Trials” will work on a project based on Open Data for a Transparent Judiciary. They already have their own database from the 12-year monitoring of the judiciary in Macedonia that they want to open and make it publicly available through the creation of a new website.

The winners at the competition have already submitted their detailed activity plans for the next six months, during which the projects are to be implemented. At the end of this month, they will take part in a joint event where they will have an opportunity to publicly present the project ideas and to work on their improvement.

Activities will include the sending of official requests for free access to information to the competent institutions, training for retrieval, analysis, processing and presentation of the data, and three data expeditions will be held.

The competition is part of the project “Open Data Civil Society Network” implemented in cooperation with the Open Knowledge Foundation, and aimed at building the capacity of civil society organizations to promote an open agenda, through the establishment of the School of Data – Macedonia.

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