Nuala is a graduate of Dublin City University, the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School and Kings Inn. She has worked in IT for the past 30 years with experience in the aviation and local government sectors. Nuala joined the Office of Government CIO in 2020 and heads up the Data Governance Support function within the Data Governance Unit. In her work, she advises the Data Governance Board and supports the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform to deliver in their responsibilities under the Data Sharing and Governance Act 2019. In particular she focuses on the ‘collect once use many times’ principle for data in order to achieve the maximum value from the data holding within the Irish public service.

Sofia holds the role of Data Policy Advisor in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications of Estonia. Her work is focused on Open Data initiatives, Data Governance and AI programmes. Mostly her work revolves around keeping in touch with different stakeholders from private, public, and non-profit organization with a purpose of bringing data-based projects to live. Together with the colleagues from Estonian Information System Authority she has been involved in the process of modernization of the State Open Data Portal.

Taavi is the product owner of the Estonian Open Data portal. He works in the data exchange department at the Estonian Information System Authority (RIA). His main goal is to manage the life cycle of the Estonian Open Data Portal, ensuring the service is up-to-date. He is also planning the necessary developments in a timely manner. Taavi’s team work closely with the central government, local government and other stakeholders (for example, Estonian Statistics, private sector, universities, etc.) to understand what are the needs of their customers. Understanding the needs, they try to implement these in the Estonian Open Data Portal. His main partner outside of the Estonian Information System Authority is the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communication. Together, they try to create an ecosystem where data collection, use, sharing, and reuse are an everyday part of business processes.

Martin is the Service Manager of the Estonian Data Exchange Layer X-tee. He works in the data exchange department at the Estonian Information System Authority (RIA). Martin’s role is being the X-tee operator and owner of the X-tee ecosystem. Duties include 

• Maintain the X-tee center on a technical level
• Provide support for X-tee members
• Continually try and improve the X-tee data exchange layer and its processes for ourselves and X-tee members – X-tee self-service environment
• Provide input and participate in the working group for X-Road software development which is actively done by NIIS (https://www.niis.org/)

Joachim is a senior advisor at The Norwegian Resource Center for Sharing and Use of Data, which is part of the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency. He mainly works to facilitate the reuse of data by coordinating initiatives across the public sector. He also has a role in developing and maintaining the national framework for information management, consisting of guides, standards, and information models.

Did you know that Slovenia is in 10th place in the OECD OurData Index? Slovenia jumped from 19th to 10th place in 2019.

Currently Aleš is Head of Division for the data economy and his work is on Data Governance Act and Data Act and open data ecosystem.

The aim of their open data team is to create a modern system of open data, which would be a backbone of the Open Data Ecosystem of Slovenia and he is humbled and honoured to lead this team.

 In the past, Aleš have successfully carried out:

• Establishment Covid-19 mobile app for tracing contacts #OstaniZdrav
• renovation and development system to opening the data of the public sector,
• development of the Geographic Information System platform as Cloud service,
• environmental spatial data quality control system at the Environment Agency, based on the ISO 19113 and 19114.

All of these experiences are useful for his current work and form the foundation of his knowledge in the field of data opening.

The achievement Aleš is most proud of is the renovation of the public sector data opening system and the establishment of the Slovenian open data ecosystem, whereas a project manager, him and his excellent colleagues managed to place Slovenia among the more advanced countries within the EU and OECD countries.

In his work, Aleš always pushes the boundaries, because that’s the only way we develop new things. His passion for sports can also be felt here. In the past, he was an amateur underwater hockey player. This is a very contact aggressive sport that teaches you to think fast – constantly looking for new solutions. The same is true in all areas. That is why he tries to look for new frontiers in his work, because only in this way can we achieve development, especially in the state administration, which is highly regulated by rules and laws. That’s why he always looks for new solutions with my colleagues, and they can also tear down a wall that seemed invincible at first glance.

Because Aleš is a geographer at heart, he is also close to the spatial representation of the environment in which we live. Therefore, he had the honour to be able to lead a group of exceptional collaborators with whom they established the GIS portal: https://gisportal.gov.si/portal. Among other things, they opened old military maps “Spezialkarte der Oesterreichischen-Ungarnischen Monarchie” on a scale of 1: 75,000 from 1880 and 1914 and part of the Franciscan cadastre from the period 1818-1828. In this way, they enabled Slovenian citizens easier access to archival data from Slovenian history.

Alenka Rožanec, PhD, is a project manager at the Ministry of Public Administration, responsible for the development of common building blocks for data exchange. She also works as assistant professor at the University of Novo mesto, Faculty of economics and informatics. Her research areas are IT strategic planning, enterprise architecture, e-business and data technologies, her bibliography includes more than 100 units. She also has extensive professional experience working on many strategic IT planning and enterprise architecture development projects for the public sector institutions and enterprises. She is a member of the Slovenian Society of Informatics.