#48_1-8

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No.48 SEPTEMBER 27, 2018
TOPIC OF THE DAY
WWW.DAY.KIEV.UA
By Oleksii SAVYTSKYI
Ukraine has placed second
among the countries that
achieved the greatest progress
over the past four years
in the field of information
disclosure. Meanwhile, this country
holds the 17th position overall out of
the 30 countries that have joined the
International Open Data Charter.
Within Ukraine, Drohobych has been
the leader in data disclosure this year.
Recently, this 100,000-strong city won
the national competition Open Data
Awards 2018.
Drohobych can offer the rest of
the country a real master class in making
routine and uninteresting bureaucratic
documentation useful to the
community as it creates new services
and even makes money.
Even as recently as two years ago,
most decisions, reports, or routine statistics
remained confined to the internal
servers of the city council or even
old paper journals. However, local officials
then began to publish the entire
information about the city’s life: from
real estate registers to tender procedures
and the number of patients admitted
by the outpatient hospital. All
these data are now made available to
residents at the city’s website, which
can be accessed from any Internet-capable
gadget.
“You can see a whole picture after
just three or four clicks, whether it concerns
finances, alliances, and conflicts
involving local councilors, or decisions
they make,” local civic activist, editorin-chief
of the Media Drohobychchyny
newspaper Mariia Kulchytska shared
her impressions.
According to her, the work of local
journalists has become much simpler.
After all, if earlier one had to submit
dozens of requests to get some figure
having to do with the city budget or tender
procedures, now it is enough to go
to the city’s website. Local authorities
post all their decisions there of their
own accord, without waiting for requests.
And these are not just scanned
bureaucratic documents, but also analyzed
data.
How open data improves Ukrainians’ lives
A master class from Drohobych
Photo by Ruslan KANIUKA, The Day
A good example of turning dull statistics
into useful services was shown in
the case of the local outpatient hospital.
The Drohobych hospital was among the
first in Ukraine to open its registry data
for citizens, enabling them to schedule
a doctor’s appointment online. In just
20 days of this September, over 9,000 citizens
did so through the e-registry.
“We save both patients’ and doctors’
time. There are no queues at the doctor’s
cabinet’s door anymore. Everything is
scheduled hour by hour, everything is
scheduled online,” acting chief doctor of
the Drohobych City Outpatient Hospital
Yuliia Honcharenko told us.
Moreover, local patients have their
own electronic medical records. People
can access them, too, using their own
smartphones, if need be, and doctors
can do the same: a patient may well
need urgent advice or be in some kind
of emergency.
“We had a case when a person had
become unconscious, so the doctors
saw in his electronic declaration that he
had diabetes, and already knew how to
proceed further, how to help him.”
This kind of healthcare reform has
also been of interest to residents of the
district and neighboring towns. According
to Drohobych officials, electronic
innovations have attracted hundreds
of so-called medical tourists to
the city. People go to Drohobych to take
advantage of the quick and convenient
services offered by the city’s doctors.
The city’s mayor is happy: this
project has been a success not only in
terms of reputation, but also economically.
After all, more data makes for better
analytics, and hence better decisions.
The city’s money is spent wisely.
“Now we can fund priority projects.
For example, we did thermo-modernization
of a kindergarten. We have
been saving on heating bills due to it.
Also, we have replaced the mains pipes,
taps and have been saving on water
bills. Such seeming trifles have a very
big impact when it is done on a city
scale, believe me,” asserted Taras Kuchma,
the mayor of Drohobych.
As a result, investors have grown
more interested in Drohobych, and the
city’s advertising revenues have doubled.
While they stood at 176,000
hryvnias in 2016, then in 2017 the figure
was already 350,000 hryvnias.
This was because the newly created
service, based on open data, allowed the
city to detect all illegal advertising
boards, and the field work was done by
citizens themselves.
“You look at the address, go to the
corresponding web service, look
whether the board is registered, and if
it is not, you submit a report to that effect
and this illegal advertisement gets
removed. Why is this important? Because
it increases the local budget’s revenues,”
Kulchytska said.
Manager of the Drohobych Smart
City program explained that the success
came from data presentation. The website
offers not just a set of dry figures
filling endless spreadsheets, but readyfor-use
analytics as well.
“You wanted the information, and
it is already here. We have 240 unique
sets of data. But if we say to residents,
‘here is an Excel spreadsheet,
now look for yourselves,’ it will come
to nothing. We have presented it in
such a way that it is interesting to residents,”
said Stanislav Haider, head of
the department of information technology
and analytics of the Drohobych
City Council. “Four illegal billboards
were found within a month after this
project started, all thanks to our citizens.
We have opened the data and visualized
it for people.”
It should be added that such a project
of open data was cheap and paid for
itself within its first year of operation.
And now it brings increasing benefits
every day. In particular, it helps the
formation of civil society.
“By default, data, just like the
city’s budget, belong to its residents.
And it is important for us that both the
residents and the authorities understand
it, that the residents act as citizens,
not guests of their city,” Haider
concluded.
The next stage of the local Smart
City program will involve the
blockchain technology applied to municipal
projects. For example, the queue
for children’s entry to kindergarten will
be monitored with the help of modern
means in the educational sector. Should
some official try to change some child’s
place in the queue manually, the
blockchain technology will record it. It
is hoped that the new approach will minimize
most corruption risks.
By Olesia SHUTKEVYCH, The Day,
Vinnytsia region
Aunique Cossack-era wooden
church has been rebuilt in
the village of Mala Rostivka,
Orativ raion. According to
the extant data, the shrine
was built back in 1776, restored in the
1830s, and closed a century ago,
sometime after 1917. The locals say,
however, that the mass was still
clandestinely celebrated in the church
until 1943, and then the structure was
used to house first a club, and later a
collective farm storage facility. The
neglect ultimately resulted in only
wooden walls of the once majestic
shrine still standing, which began to
overgrow first with weeds, and then
with trees.
The local farmer Mykola Motuziuk
and his oncologist son Ihor resolved
to revive the shrine. At first,
they were looking for and studying
the documents about the church; they
say that they had covered half of
Ukraine while searching for a similar
structure, but had not found one.
Therefore, they resolved, with the
support of historians, restorers, and
the village community, to restore this
shrine of the extraordinary architecture.
The restoration lasted two years
and has now entered its final stage.
The church already hosts divine services
on major feast days. The farmer
refuses to reveal how much money he
has spent on this unique building, saying
only that money has no memory,
while the preserved church will last
for many years.
“I came to Orativ raion in the
1980s. Each time I visited Mala Rostivka,
the destroyed church on the
“If our ancestors built it, we have to preserve it”
In Vinnytsia region, a local farmer has restored
a Cossack-era church at his own expense,
with only interior repairs still to be done
hill unnerved me. The church was
decaying, in fact rotting, and it
pained me. The village mayor sent
letters to the authorities, even went
to the Exhibition of Achievements of
National Economy in Kyiv requesting
that they take away the church,
but since the shrine was not a monument
of architecture, nobody responded.
Meanwhile, people (if they
deserve to be called this name)
ripped up the floor, since it was
made of solid oak boards, and carried
them to their farmsteads. Over the
years, the shrine decayed until there
were only ruins left...
Photo courtesy of the author
THE NEGLECT ULTIMATELY RESULTED IN ONLY WOODEN WALLS OF THE ONCE
MAJESTIC SHRINE STILL STANDING, WHICH BEGAN TO OVERGROW FIRST
WITH WEEDS, AND THEN WITH TREES. IT WAS THE LOCAL FARMER MYKOLA
MOTUZIUK AND HIS SON IHOR WHO REVIVED THE SHRINE
MYKOLA MOTUZIUK
“My son and I sought data on the
church and found that the construction
of the Church of the Intercession
in the village of Mala Rostivka was
completed in 1776. It was built to a
unique design, namely a wooden tetraconch
with an attached bell tower.
Such shrines were often built by the
Cossacks, and therefore the village
church is known as a Cossack one.
When we took to farming, we first intended
to demolish it and build a new
shrine from scratch. However, we
then realized that if our ancestors had
built it, we had to preserve it. Having
saved a little money, we began restoration
work in the summer of 2016, just
after the harvest ended.
“There was no red tape to combat,
because the church was not listed as a
monument of architecture. Still, we
could not do it without the help of experts.
We had to know how reliable
the beams were. An expert examination
helped. The experts examined a
piece of timber from the framework
that we brought to them for testing,
and found that timber making up the
walls of the church was about
300 years old. We then left some
beams in place, but a lot of them had
to be replaced.
“We started by bringing there a
few cranes, raising the building, putting
it on logs, strengthening the
foundation, putting oak weights in,
laying wooden flooring so that the
acoustics were good during divine
services, and roofing the structure.
All the walls were treated with antiseptic
to keep insects out. We have restored
the domes and erected a bell
tower. Now the church is exactly like
it once was. All that remains is to
make an iconostasis and do landscaping
work outside. We are in the final
stage of our effort. A priest from the
neighboring village of Chahiv celebrates
the mass on feast days. People
do attend, but there are not that many
of them. The village is small, with
150 to 200 residents only, but we see
kids at every divine service, and we
like it.”
Mala Rostivka is located in the
middle of nowhere, 20 kilometers
from the raion center, so tourists are
rare there. It is a pity, really, because
apart from the Cossack church, the
magnificent palace of General Zabotin
is located in the village. It has been
finely preserved to this day, even
though it stands empty in the
foothills.