Balkans were a part of the debate which mainly centered on the situation in Ukraine and “all the things you'd want to ask about the 2.0 surveillance”, but you have never bothered.  Among many other great guests Daniel Domscheit-Berg previously associated with Wikileaks, and Dymitro Gnap - creator of the already famous Yanukovychleaks [yanukovychleaks.org] spoke at the event. Even though survaillance is not the main topic of this blog post, I will still squeezee in a little piece of advice for all: read the regulations when installing apps on your devices! Life is not too short for that.

During the second day of the conference Anna Kuliberda, an opengov and freedom of information geek currently residing in the Balkans, facilitated a panel about Balkan elections and technology tools in use in the region that that facilitate the process. Darko Brkan (Zasto ne, Bosnia and Herzegovina), Veljko Milicevic (Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability, Serbia), Bardhyl Jashari (Metamorphosis, Macedonia) and Milica Kovacevic (Center for Democratic Transition, Montenegro) were the panelists. They talked about how monitoring elections and measuring political statements’ fulfillment (check out Istinomjer as an example of the tools from the Truth-o-meter Network the above organizations are part of) changes the discourse of  expectations towards politicians and hence, makes accountability a recognized factor of democratic process.

Before the conference 9 winning teams of the last year’s Balkan Challenges met for an evaluation meeting and workshops. We have all shared experiences, seen where we are at, and in which points we could help each other. Tony Bowden (agitator for MySociety) gave us a few pieces of advice regarding civic apps (like “simplify, simplify, simplify” and “automate, automate, automate”), and Wiesław Kotecki told us why it is so important to make user experience a priority in every social app development process. Even though Challenges Winners weren’t part of the Central Open Data Hackathon which took part over the weekend (partly because they were already leaving, and partly because of the mysterious flu that took us all down), the above truths and hints were all being tested at the National Stadium, where by the end of last Sunday 15 teams came up with working prototypes of applications. The winning one, MyPolice, points a user to the policeman responsible for the district you touched upon on the map of Poland. Check out the list of all projects here.

It has been long but interesting few days. And since Open Data, Politics and Technology are our favourite topics, we will see each other again soon at the upcoming POINT conference in Sarajevo (the documentation of the last conference edition is to be found here).