The application NowPark.me, which easily finds the nearest parking space to any given location – designed by the students Jordan Krstevski and Ivana Taleska – has won the top prize at the Open Data Hackathon, held in Skopje on June 3-26.
Participants in the competition, organized by the Microsoft Macedonia office and supported by the Ministry of Information Society and Administration, developed applications by using open government data.
“We’ve worked on a parking space app, which is beneficial in solving the major issue with finding parking spaces in the capital. It is a well-known fact that there are roughly 200,000 cars in Skopje and about 20,000 available parking spaces. Our application is designed in such a way to easily find the nearest parking space in real time,” stated Taleska.
She elaborated that the app allowed users i.e. private entities to interact and offer their parking space to those who are looking for one.
Stevan Kostovski won the second prize for his application, dubbed SmartPhonebook, that helps users to find out if some of their contacts have changed the mobile operator. Kristijan Arsovski and Darko Kotovski won the third prize for the application Culture Afp, which offers an overview of all theatres and movie theatres in Macedonia
Presenting the awards, Minister of Information Society and Administration Ivo Ivanovski said 154 data bases from institutions were made available to the competitors. By opening these data bases, Macedonia is a leader not only in the region, but also beyond, which has been already recognized by the Open Data Institute, according to him.
Macedonia is the 32nd country that has signed the Open Government Partnership Agreement obliging signatories in a transparent way to release data in order the private and civil sector to design apps or use data.
According to Ivanovski, the international public isn’t informed enough on how much data were open in Macedonia. Compared to other countries from the former Yugoslavia, Macedonia has a lot of data.
“Therefore, we are working together with the Open Data Institute for Macedonia to use their methodology in order to be presented as a transparent country that is opening its data even before a request is filed for the opening of data,” said Ivanovski
