National Assembly Deputy Speaker Gordana Comic opened the gathering expressing her hope that, by learning together and establishing a national action plan, the participants could enable the creation of the prerequisites necessary for the development of a more open public administration in Serbia. When criticising public administration employees, the citizens mainly complain of superficiality and arrogance resulting from bad habits and inherited mentality which is no reason not to do the job funded by public resources, stressed Deputy Speaker Comic. The National Assembly passed a series of laws creating the preconditions to reduce abuse and the level of prejudice in public administration and would like to spread the message the “if I am in power, that does not mean I can do as I please”. In addition to passing the legislative framework, the laws and other regulations comprising it should be implemented and controlled so as to improve the existing laws and pass new ones which would help improve the operation of public administration. The key to an open government system is knowing, publicly and clearly, who does what, and that system can best eliminate small and large-scale corruption in society. Open government is important as it contains two vital things, regulations banning corruptive practices and the potential to instruct the citizens through campaigns where and how they can access information through which they can exercise their rights, and where such information is available. The best characteristic of open government is that it is bidirectional and it spreads information which is a revolution in public affairs. But as any other revolution this one needs patience which is why we must work on passing a national action plan and accept the declaration on open government which will result in the adoption of standards to benefit all the citizens, concluded the National Assembly Deputy Speaker.
The participants of the gathering organised by the Ministry of Culture, Media and Information Society, were also addressed by Jasna Matic, State Secretary at the Ministry, who spoke of Serbia’s membership in the Open Government Partnership, while the representatives of the Anti-Corruption Agency and the representatives of the non-governmental sector discussed how to create a more open government.