Riga, February 1: The conference “Open Cooperation for Innovation” organized by the Latvian Open Technology Association (LATA) was held on 31 January 2019, with the final presentation of the LATA Annual Awards to pioneers in the development, use and promotion of open information and communication technologies.
Among the winners of the award was also the Central Election Commission, which gained the first place in the category “The most open institution in the public sector.” The Central Election Commission is awarded for ensuring that information about all candidates and election results are available in the open data format. “It shows that Latvia stands for democratic and transparent elections,” the LATA says in its press release.
Arnis Cimdars, the Chairman of the Central Election Commission, when receiving the award noticed that the digital environment opens new opportunities for aggregating and publishing of election results, but new opportunities in the digital environment also require that users develop new skills to conceive and use such dynamic information. Developing of these skills is the direction that needs to be worked on in the future. “On the election night, we as election managers were not doing anything new, the same as we did 100 years ago, but the digital environment and the new technologies are the ones that allow the counting of votes and the publication of results to be made faster and publicly available to everyone.”
The LATA awards were awarded in three categories - in the public sector for the most open work of the institution, in the private sector – for the most excellent technology solution in business and for a natural person – for the most significant contribution to promoting open technologies.
Besides the Central Election Commission, the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Latvia and Axia Broadcast Technologies Ltd. received the Year Awards in the “Best Technology Solution in Private Sector” category for the development of professional quality sound transmission and switching systems based on standard IP/Ethernet networks.
Viktors Zagorskis gained the first place in the category “The most important contribution to promoting open technologies as a natural person” for his active position, confidence and participation in learning and implementing of open source code solutions, preparing educational materials and educating the public.
* The LATA’s information and the publicity photo used for this article.
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