Open Government Partnership - Armenia

Last week the OGP published a headline list of commitments that countries made at the London OGP Summit. Some of these commitments are new open government reforms that will be part of OGP action plans being developed over the coming months, and some are enhanced commitments from previous plans. Each country filled out a short template about their commitment which can be found below.

These are unedited documents being published for the first time today. We encourage governments and civil society in each of the countries to work together on further refinement and implementation of the commitments.

Armenia is going to create an electronic mining datebase: Here is the description of a new commitment.

Electronic Mining Database

Given the recent developments in the sector of the Armenian mining industry, the issue of fair, transparent and efficient resource (mine) allocation is among key priorities for the Armenian Government.

Most of the data on the Armenian geology (including the data on mining sites and ore occurrences) are stored in archives of the Republican geological foundation. It was established by the Armenian Government in 2002, and aims to gather and store general data, reports, mining permits and researches on Armenia’s geological sector. The Foundation’s archives contain reports on 750 mining sites and 600 ore occurrences. The content of each report amounts to 2-3 books on average. Moreover, the information on mining sites and ore occurrences also includes 5000 units of foundation data sets in total, as well as geological maps and initial information sets.According to the latest update, the foundation archives contain about 12000 text-based reports (150 pages on average) and 8000 maps/graphs (1.5 sqm on average).

The information on mining sites and ore occurrences is a great value for the Armenian mining industry. Furthermore, the significant part of data stored in the Foundation is of huge historical and scientific importance.

Thus, to insure transparent and efficient appropriation of limited geological resources, as well as to preserve the information in archives the Armenian Government has initiated the digitalization program of data stored in the Foundation’s archives. 

The objectives of the Program are as follows:

• To make data widely available on request through the Foundation’s web page;  
• To preserve the information available, as the data in archives is paper-based and a part of it was damaged due to poor maintenance and time-caused decay, and will degrade even more over time.