2007

Active Disclosure of Information by Bulgarian Public Bodies

Results from monitoring of executive institutions web sites - 2007

For a second successive year, AIP conducted a study on the Internet sites of the institutions from the executive power.

The aim of this study, which was conducted by AIP between March 24 and March 31, 2007, was to check how local governmental authorities and institutions of the executive branch make use of the Internet to publish important information on their own initiative and whether citizens are being accommodated when seeking information on the official institutional websites. The results from 2007 were compared with the results from an identical survey done in 2006.

Results and analyses from the 2006 study were published in the annual reports Access to Information in Bulgaria 2005.

Analyses of results from the monitoring is published in AIP annual report Access to Information in Bulgaria 2006.

411 public institutions were selected for review from the official Register of Administrative Structures and can be broken down by type as follows:

We believe that the study is representative enough, since it covers all ministries, all regional governors, all municipalities and most of the other administrative structures in Bulgaria.

The main task of the seven reviewers from the AIP team was to find out whether each institution maintained its own Internet site. Official web sites were maintained by 319 institutions.

 
Last year's explanation of this fact was that a number of small municipalities could not afford to create and maintain a website. At the same time, a study done in the same year by the National Centre for the Study of Public Opinion (NCSPO) revealed that a very small percentage of the Bulgarian population – 3,6% - uses the Internet to obtain information about the work of public institutions.[1] More recent studies conducted in the summer 2006 show that this percentage has increased to 15%,[2]which is still low in comparison to other countries of the European Union.