We recently had an interview with Katarina Kosmina, project coordinator for the competitiveness and digital governance team at UNDP Serbia and regional coordinator for the Global Data Barometer handling 5 countries—North Macedonia, Serbia, Turkey, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Katarina shared more about their work involving communities in creating and sharing data.
UNDP Serbia collaborates with the government to create opportunities for more open data sharing. They have also embarked on projects that involve communities in collection and sharing of open data—from air quality monitoring to tree planting data, UNDP Serbia is committed to involving the communities they work with in data creation and sharing.
About the Competitiveness and Digital Governance Team
The competitiveness and digital governance team works on helping the Serbian government reach a sustainable and inclusive digital transformation. This paves the way to more open government data and a higher level of transparency. In 2014 UNDP Serbia created an open data readiness assessment which led to the establishment of the national open data portal in 2015. They have also embarked on community building work which has seen more and more communities getting involved in data. Hackathons have become a key tool for community engagement as young people are tasked with ‘creating solutions that use open data in fields such as health, environmental protection, public finances, education, and civil society’ according to Katarina.
On working with the Global Data Barometer, Katarina mentioned that ‘the GDB assessment is a great addition to our work because it will enable us to make more data based decisions on how we plan projects and who we collaborate with’.
UNDP Serbia collaborates with the government to create opportunities for more open data sharing. They have also embarked on projects that involve communities in collection and sharing of open data—from air quality monitoring to tree planting data, UNDP Serbia is committed to involving the communities they work with in data creation and sharing.
Community involvement in collecting and sharing open data
Katarina’s team works to create a demand for open data in local communities. This entails working with NGOs, the media, academic institutions, and private companies to help them engage in constructive dialogue with government agencies. Katarina highlighted that ‘they help create projects using government data and creating new innovative services or portals’. An example of their work was a collaboration ‘with a group of young researchers, academic researchers, and through an open data challenge’. This initiative saw the creation of an algorithm that uses open satellite data to help people plant trees in areas where they thrive in and around Serbia. Katarina added that ‘the algorithm tells you where you can plant trees in different parts of Serbia using geographical data’ . The algorithm uses open data on tree species , weather, land quality, humidity and other aspects to guide tree planters.
Another interesting community initiative that UNDP Serbia is undertaking is engaging more people in the collection of environmental data. Katarina indicated that ‘there are less than 30 air quality monitoring stations centralized in Serbia in different locations. While they give precise data, the air quality filters are also costly’. The available stations’ data is collected and published in an open format by the Agency for Environmental Protection. However, the data does not cover micro locations due to the low number of available stations.
To cover more micro locations, UNDP Serbia enlisted the help of one company and two different NGO’s. Katarina added that ‘we created a network of citizens doing air quality monitoring and opening up that data. So we provided them with hardware and software and showed them how to enable the sharing of data. We started off with 30 people and now that platform is growing and there’s more citizen air quality monitoring stations—mostly in the capital city, but it’s also spreading to different parts of Serbia’.
This citizen science project allows open data to be used at a household level by runners, or parents taking their children to the parkour dog walkers. The project not only raises awareness about air pollution in Serbia, it also enables more data to be collected and it enables informed decision making by citizens.
In addition to their work with communities, UNDP Serbia is committed to improving women participation in ICT training programs. For example when they ran ICT retraining programs they noticed the low number of applications coming from women. Katarina indicated that ‘women were less than 30% so last year before we launched a new call for IT retraining for the general population, we actually worked on developing specific messages and specific visuals for women and then doing targeting on social media’. This was a successful campaign as their current program has 41% women. Katarina shared a key lesson that equity and inclusion only happen ‘when you re-evaluate all of the processes that lead to a gender gap in your project and then you see which processes you need to transform in order to reach more women or inspire more women to participate’.
Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash
