Hackers shut down the open data portal, it will be opened in March

The open data portal, on which citizens, the economy... should have access to data that is marked as public and that institutions are certainly obliged to give to interested parties for inspection, does not work from cyber attacks, but from the Ministry of Public Administration (MJU). They told "Vijesti" that they expect it to be available again in March.

"Due to the cyber attack on the state IT infrastructure in August 2022, the portal is not functional. The open data portal (data.gov.me) is currently located on servers that were affected by cyber attacks and need to be migrated to a completely new server environment in order to provide the highest possible degree of cyber protection according to best practice recommendations. The migration process of this IS will be completed when the appropriate conditions are met for the implementation of this process. Otherwise, the recovery of information systems itself is a long-term process that takes place according to the service recovery plan. The establishment of the Open Data portal is expected by March 10, 2023 at the latest," the department of the minister in the technical mandate told "Vijesti" Maraš Dukaj.

The MJU stated that now, in cooperation with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), i.e. partners, they are working on collecting as many data sets as possible "with an emphasis on increasing 'High value' data".

After that, when the Open Data Portal is operational again, as they added, the MJU "plans to work on the inter-institutional promotion of the portal itself".

"With the ultimate goal that the citizens of Montenegro recognize its importance and enjoy its benefits," said the department.

When asked if they worked on improving the portal itself, the Ministry of Justice said that, in cooperation with UNDP, during the last year they worked on improving its functionality in terms of monitoring the use of the portal, accessibility for persons with disabilities (PWD), extension to local governments , visualization of the most popular data sets and evaluation of data sets, and connection to the EU portal.

When asked which institutions are the most up-to-date when it comes to providing data, they said that they are the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Justice, and the Parliament of Montenegro.

The Ministry of Justice said that, before the cyber attack, in August 2022, 20 institutions published 197 sets of data from 15 areas on that website. While it was online, as the public administration department said, the interested parties mostly downloaded sets of data on MPs' earnings and a list of active and deleted non-governmental organizations.

The open data portal was presented in July 2018, which was a legal obligation resulting from the amendments to the Law on Free Access to Information (FIA) from May 2017.

"The portal enables searching, connecting, downloading and re-using public data for commercial and non-commercial purposes through a common catalog of metadata. The portal contributes to the regulation of the right to use publicly published data and releases the value of public data as a public good for everyone to use," the information on open data management states.

It is added that this portal is "a central point for accessing public sector data, as well as a place of interaction with data users, the business sector, the IT and academic community, citizens and other interested parties".

"The main users of open data, in addition to citizens as the broadest group, are the business sector, the non-governmental sector, the IT community, the academic community and the media, for whom this access to data facilitates the work and planning of activities, as well as the numerous researches they conduct. On the other hand, the opening of data facilitates the public administration and reduces the volume of procedures conducted in accordance with the Law on Free Access to Information," the document reads.