LATA award 2020

The Latvian Open Technology Association (LATA) is a leading and highly influential ICT association in Latvia that promotes cooperation between technology suppliers and public sector consumers, including public, municipal authorities, educational and scientific institutions. They promote the openness of technologies, interoperability, re-usability and open standards, along with organization of awareness-raising activities on open technologies and open data to educate Latvian citizens and promote research and development in these areas. Each year they organize an annual conference, which attract both the public and private sector, governmental organizations and others to provide an insight on the current state of the art and the most recent advances in this area, as well as to identify challenges that should be resolved by means of collaboration of both industry and academia. The conference ends with the annual LATA awards ceremony, where the most significant contributors of the year are awarded.

This year (2021), I was recognized as a person of the year for promotion of open data and open technologies by means of open government data- related researches, public activity and other achievements!!!!

Here is just a short list of some activities that took place in 2020:
  • 4 scientific articles on OGD have been published this year, devoted to both the timeliness of open pandemic-related data in the context of 60 countries (see full-text), a user-centered analysis of the usability of OGD portals in 41 countries (see full-text, see full-text), detailed analysis on the Latvian OGD portal (see full-text), etc.;
  • talks delivered at 3 international and a few more Latvian conferences presenting OGD-related studies;
  • informative report on the usability of Latvian open data portal and guidelines on its improvement (available in Latvian) has been prepared and published for the Latvian audience to raise the awareness of both the OGD by themselves and their potential, the OGD ecosystem and stakeholders involved, the benefits and current challenges of both the OGD, national OGD portal and its state of maturity compared to others etc.;
  • acting as an organizing committee and publicity chair of several international conferences;
  • acting as a technical committee of several international conferences, including session chairing;
  • acting as an invited reviewer for several high-quality (Q1) journals;
  • development of the “Open data and data quality” workshop for students of the University of Latvia;
  • open data hackathon mentor for 11 and 12-class pupils;
  • advanced lectures to pupils of the School of Excellence;
  • supervision of bachelor’s and qualification theses, as well as course works on the OGD- and open technology-related topics;
  • etc.

Thank you Latvian Open Technologies Association for this recognition!!!