Data Centar is an open online platform that provides easy access to datasets of various public information at the national and local level in Serbia. It was developed to help journalists, activists, researchers and public officials in search for valuable data to power their stories, campaigns, analyses or decision making. With the use of latest technologies, Data Centar simplifies, integrates and prepares complex, disparate and disorganized datasets for easy and meaningful use by all interested stakeholders. By making good use of public data, Data Centar and its users push for governments to offer useful and good quality data and provide the public what they need to participate in decision making as active and informed citizens.
We wish to grow into a single online hub for collection, processing and preparation of different datasets of public information at the local, national and regional level.
After the MVP launch in 2015, Data Centar will expand the number of municipal and other datasets from Serbia, add 2016 budgetary data, and at least two different datasets proposed by the community. The main focus of Data Centar in 2016 will be, in fact, to build a strong community and make sure they are at the forefront of the Data Centar's growth.
In 2016 and 2017, Data Centar will keep growing organically and responsibly. We will also advocate for increasing the level of governmental openness by influencing the state of open data in Serbia: we wish to see at least two governmental datasets integrated into Data Centar through an open, government-managed API.
Data Centar wants to go global: we wish to host datasets from at least two Balkan region countries by end 2017, and incorporate datasets from non-Balkan countries.
By the end of 2017, Data Centar aims to be a completely functional open platform that provides broad, easy and full access to multiple datasets of public information from many countries in the region. Our goal is to gain recognition as a one-stop-shop for opening data in a usable and useful way, with a strong and active user community that leads us. This way, Data Centar will be able to influence governments and institutions to increase the quality and provide access to open and useful data.