On February 26 2014 Institute for Development of Freedom of Information (IDFI) with the financial support of USAID program Good Governance in Georgia (G-3) organized a round table meeting concerning the issue of OGP Implementation- E-request of Public Information and Proactive Disclosure.

The meeting was attended by the representatives of the administration of the President, Ministries, other public institutions and NGOs.

The meeting was opened by the chief of party of USAID program Good Governance in Georgia Maris Mikelsons. He talked about the achievements of the Georgian Government in terms of fulfilling the commitments taken within the frames of the open government partnership program.

The Chairperson of Institute for Development of Freedom of Information (IDFI) Levan Avalishvili presented the report prepared by IDFI regarding the implementation of proactive disclosure of information by the ministries. Public institutions – ministries and Offices of State Ministers were evaluated according to the evaluation forms elaborated by IDFI. Furthermore, IDFI presented the rating of proactive disclosure of information by the public institutions.The following five ministries showed the best results: Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Sports and Youth Affairs, Ministry of Education and Science, Ministry of Energy, Ministry of Regional Development and Infrastructure, Ministry of Healthcare.

The director of IDFI, Giorgi Kldiashvili talked about the tendencies of implementing the electronic request of the public information, while the representative of Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association Sulkhan Saladze presented the research about the December 10^th reports. 

Giorgi Kldiashvili summarized the practice of e-request and proactive release of information in ministries. The research displayed that the majority of the institutions utilize e-mail, web-page integrated electronic contact form or my.gov.ge portal for communication. IDFI electronically requested information from various public institutions through above mentioned communication tools. The agencies showed satisfactory results.

Each presentation was followed by a discussion. The representatives of public institutions asked various questions and proposed suggestions and opinions. Discussion concerned number of problematic issues including the topic of storing the public data, electronic filing system, responsibilities of the FoI officers. The representative of Tbilisi City Hall emphasized the technical difficulties that are connected to uploading big amount of information on server and suggested creating the common open data portal for every public institution. In the end of the meeting, participants talked about the problems that are connected to the identification of a person who is requesting public information.

Institute for Development of Freedom of Information will hold such meetings on the next stage of the monitoring.