Yesterday, Novi Pazar became a first city in Serbia to publish its 2022 budget in open data form! In addition, Novi Pazar published many other datasets, mostly local geodata, and you can check them all out the National Open Data Portal.
Even tough data at the central level of governance are usually recognized as high-value datasets, local datasets also have immersive value, especially in the smart city concept development as well as local services design against the need of citizens. For example, with GTFS data (General Transit Feed Specification), Google Transit is available in 5 cities in Serbia (Uzice, Nis, Kragujevac, Subotica and Belgrade), improving urban mobility of public transport users in these cities.
In addition to the Open Data Portal, the budget of Novi Pazar is available on the platform budzeti.data.gov.rs, which provides simple and user-friendly visualizations of the local budgets. Release of open budgets presents an important step in increasing the transparency of public spending at the local level. They provide insight into the plan for local spending of public funds to various stakeholders (citizens, economy, media) with a goal to strengthen the trust between local government and citizens.
We hope that the rest cities and municipalities will follow the example of Novi Pazar and publish their budgets for 2022 in machine readable form.