What is ODok?

The abbreviation ODok is understood to mean the electronic circulation of documents between the central bodies of state administration, the Parliament and the Office of the President of the Czech Republic. ODok was conceived of as a project whose guarantor was and still is the Office of the Government of the Czech Republic. The project's goal has been to simplify and make more effective the exchange of documents, primarily for meetings of the government between bodies of state administration, but also for other public administration entities. The reason for the project's realisation was the fact that even in the 1990s, documents were exchanged between civil servants first only in printed form, and later they were saved on diskette. This system was unsatisfactory, especially for the needs of the Chamber of Deputies, which works with the government's proposed laws, and the system did not correspond with either the trends or possibilities provided by information technology at the time. For this reason, this project was created at the end of the 1990s. Its result is two electronic libraries – eKLEP (the Electronic Library of the Legislative Process) and eVláda (eGovernment, or the Electronic Library of Government Materials).

What do both libraries have in common? They are not public. Access is only possible through logins whose holders are the ministries and other central administration authorities, regions and other approved subjects of state administration.
In addition, both libraries have in common that they contain documents intended for meetings of the government (proposed laws, proposed ordinances, concepts, strategies, etc.).

How do the libraries differ? In general terms, eKLEP is a working library primarily intended for authorities which create documents, save them in the library, comment on them, alter them as needed and update the saved version.
In this library, documents can not only be read, but also they can actually be worked with. In contrast, eVláda [eGovernment], as the name implies, is intended for the needs of the government. Documents can only be read in this library.

More specifically. The eKLEP library contains materials sent to the so-called interministerial comment process, as well as comments of individual ministries sent on materials, the standpoint of the government's legislative council, the versions of materials for meetings of the government and the approval of final versions of the materials with the prepared comments from the meetings of the government.
The eVláda library contains documents intended for the meetings of the government, documents after government meetings (i.e. approved materials), current programmes of government meetings, resolutions and transcripts from government meetings, archives of the programmes of government meetings and a graphical overview of the government's tasks, i.e. an overview on the tasks of individual ministries for the given year, as well as a graphical illustration of the means of their fulfillment.

One more note about the abbreviation 'eKLEP.' This library was originally conceived of for legislative materials only. Its scope was later expanded to include so-called non-legislative documents such as concepts, reports, strategies, action plans, etc. But the library's original name was kept.

In the event of public interest in government documents, a so-called library of prepared legislation(http://eklep.vlada.cz/eklep/page.jsf in Czech) has been launched on the Public Administration Portal, which, on the basis of a decision by the Government of the Czech Republic (resolution No. 816 from 2007) makes accessible documents of a legislative character (especially proposed laws) intended for meetings of the government. This library makes it possible to gain an overview on what the current government is preparing in the area of legislation, and especially also on what it has approved, and in which form. The public can also get to the specific wording of approved documents, and can compare them with the resulting documents published in the Collection of Laws. Aside from these libraries, citizens can also make use of ministries' websites, which tend to publish such things as proposed laws for public discussion.

ODok is on the pages of vlada.cz (in Czech).