News
13.05.13 | Otakar Motejl Fund invites you to a data-driven workshop and an open data meetup
Otakar Motejl Fund organizes another workshop within its education program Watchdog academy, this time focused on working with data. The training will take place on May 21 - 22 at Prague’s National Technical Library and will be led by Michael Bauer (School of Data) and Anna Kuliberda (Fundacja Techsoup)
25.02.13 | We want open data!
On the occasion of the International Open Data Day, Otakar Motejl Fund called on the Government and the ministries of the Czech Republic to adopt the principle of open data and fulfill their commitments to make their data sources public on February 23, 2013. The appeal has been signed by hundreds of major Czech business companies, non-governmental organizations and individual citizens. Otakar Motejl Fund was established and is administered by Open Society Fund Prague.
21.02.13 | Stronger efforts needed to end segregation of Roma in the Czech Republic
"Segregation of Roma children in education remains a serious human rights concern in the Czech Republic. Many of them are still taught as children with mild disabilities, in contravention of the 2007 D.H. judgment of the European Court of Human Rights which condemned the Czech Republic for this practice. Urgent action is needed to remedy this shortcoming", said today Nils Muižnieks, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, releasing a report based on the findings of his visit to this country carried out on 12-15 November 2012, which focused on the human rights of Roma and persons with disabilities. Open Society Fund Prague and Open Society Foundations coordinators helped to organize the program of the Commissioner in the Czech Republic.
21.02.13 | Changes in public procurement legislation are necessary
Almost 42 % of public procurement contractors are owned by foreign companies, and less than 40 % by Czech or foreign natural persons. The State awards more than four percent of public contracts to its own entities; churches, associations and higher education institutions account for four percent of contractors, while in 10 % of cases the ultimate beneficiary cannot be tracked down. These data ensue from a project by the Centre of Applied Economics, which was financially supported by the Anticorruption Endowment (NFPK), the Otakar Motejl Fund and the national daily Hospodářské noviny to study the ownership structures of 1,500 awardees of 4,424 public procurement contracts amounting to about 117 billion CZK in total and called by Czech government ministries and regional authorities in the period from 2009 to September 2012.
21.01.13 | Media freedom stands on self-confident journalists
The issues of Internet regulation and media freedom were discussed at a meeting of leading managers of the Czech media and digital media experts which was held on January 15, 2013 by Open Society Fund Prague and Czech Google. The meeting was organized as a part of the annual Journalism Award.
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First steps of inclusive education in the regions of the Czech Republic 
For more than a year, Open Society Fund Prague has been collaborating with the regional governorates of the Czech Republic in developing an inclusive education strategy. Karlovy Vary governorate was the first one to start the work and it is now the first one to put recommendations for higher inclusion into practice.
A Message of Solidarity 
Traveling this week across Europe (from London to Budapest) I saw afresh how essential is the need, and how vital is the call, for solidarity. Solidarity Now is a new initiative to respond to the crisis in Europe and Greece. Inspired by George Soros’s deep personal commitment to the promise of Europe, Solidarity Now’s message is one of unity rather than charity.
We want open data! 
Otakar Motejl Fund calls on the Government of the Czech Republic and the ministries of the Czech state to adopt the principle of open government data and fulfil their commitments to make their data sources public. As part of the Open Government Partnership initiative of 4 April 2012 the Czech Republic pledged to make public its ten most important data sources in an open data format by the end of 2012. To date only one has been made public. The Czech Republic has thus failed to fulfil its commitments.



