On December 23, IDFI presented the new concept of the new web site of Tbilisi City Hall. With the support of the Open Society Georgia Foundation IDFI has been working on this project for several months.
The project aims at ensuring the transparency of City Hall and replacing the current web page of Tbilisi City Hall with more transparent web portal which will ensure high degree of accountability of the city hall, giving the opportunity to citizens of interacting with Mayor’s office as well as other reporting agencies.
“The City Hall should be transparent and accountable to the people. At this stage, transparency and accountability will be achieved through upgraded web portal. With the support of the Open Society Georgia Foundation and IDFI, this project has been launched with the aim of creating the most modern and transparent Web page for Tbilisi City Hall. We also have an initiative to join the Open Government Partnership initiative and information regarding this initiative will be published on the portal. We are committed to publish information on the budget, procurement and so forth” – David Narmania, Mayor of Tbilisi says.
In addition to the initiative of joining the Open Government Partnership often referred as OGP, Tbilisi City Hall intends to regulate proactive publishing of information. “We will publish the information in advance; we will have the list of information that should be proactively published, which, on the one hand, will reduce the workload of our office, as information requests will decrease.”
There have been many questions with regards to accountability and transparency of the Tbilisi City Hall over years. This was mainly caused by the lack of access to financial and other kind of necessary information on the projects implemented by the Tbilisi City Hall and its subordinate agencies. The idea of a new project was raised on the basis of this requirement. Tinatin Bolkvadze, the Local Democracy Development Program Manager at Open Society Georgia Foundation says that “Tbilisi City Hall has been promoting the idea of developing this concept from the very beginning. For years, journalists, citizens and non-governmental organizations have been concerned about the limited communication and restricted access to information through the web page of the City Hall.”
One of the most important innovations is that current web page is transforming into the web portal, which will unify the web pages of all district administrations:
“Many innovations will be introduced through the concept that we have offered to the City Hall. First of all, this implies a decentralized approach to disseminate information. For instance: district administrations do not have their own websites and one can receive the information only through the Tbilisi City Hall. Another way to obtain information is to visit their Facebook pages. Portal is not a Web page – it is a system, where all the structural entity will have its own sub-page and will have the opportunity to publish information according to the common standard and Framework” – said Levan Avalishvili, representative of IDFI. 
According to the new concept, following possibilities will be available through a new Web page:
