Goal: Increase the amount of open data available in Georgia as a tool for public accountability and improve understanding and awareness of open data concepts.

TI Georgia will: 

●          Systematically scrape and reprocess existing government open data websites, at minimum including state procurement announcements, privatization details, company registration, and land records. This work will underlie research and analysis that will be performed in other areas of this project as well. If other sets are made available online during the course of this project, they will be scraped as well on an as-needed basis for other work performed by TI Georgia, assuming they do not follow best practices for open data sources.

●          Republish the scraped data sets on newly designed websites that will provide users with improved analytics, search options, and ways to stay updated on developments in the data sets. For example, the website for the procurement website will include: a way to receive alerts when new tenders are posted by certain agencies or call for certain fields; an automatic system for flagging potentially suspect tenders (such as majors tenders awarded to newly-formed corporations); and graphs and visualizations allowing users to view aggregate data such as the total value of tenders awarded to a certain firm, and ways to compare the amounts spent by agencies on different types of tenders. 

●          Create a public FOI website which will be used to manage and publish TI Georgia’s FOI requests so that everyone can see the requests made and information received. The site will be opened to the public so that anyone can use it to easily generate printable FOI requests. An application programming interface (API) will be created on the site so that it can be easily integrated with existing sites focused on FOI in Georgia, such as OpenData.ge, which concentrates on the results of FOI requests and the data contained in them, and GiveMeInfo.ge, which concentrates on continuously tracking the general tendencies in handling FOI requests in different agencies. If necessary, the operators of these sites will be provided with technical support to help them to integrate the data from our site into their own websites.

●          Advocate with the government to improve their existing open data web sites. To do this, a scoring system based on the existing open data guidelines will be created, and assessments of each open data website run by the Georgian government will be published. The government is very sensitive to rankings and scoring of its performance, so TI Georgia believes that scorecards and a ranking of government agencies will provide constructive and positive feedback for good performance that will induce inter-agency competition and improvement in the practice of open data in Georgia. TI Georgia will publish these rankings once per year. 

●          Monitor the implementation of Georgia’s commitments to the OGP, and advocate for improvements where necessary within and beyond an OGP working group that TI Georgia is part of. TI Georgia will closely monitor whether Georgia is acting in accordance with the guiding principles of the OGP, and advocate with local and international actors based on its findings.

●          Provide training sessions for local journalists in data processing and analysis techniques. TI Georgia will provide journalists with enough information to begin using technology tools for investigation and analysis on their own. TI Georgia will conduct one training sessions for journalists in Tbilisi, and four in Georgia’s regions. It is expect to reach at least 30 journalists in Georgia’s regions, and 20 in Tbilisi. A video version of the training will be released on YouTube, allowing any interested journalist or student to benefit from it.