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Box | reboot11 5 comments

Open Government Data

Getting Public Service Information out in the open

With the EU directive on PSI in place, there is a lot going on in different European countries to get governments to open up their data. Both to increase the transparancy of government, as well as making reuse of government data by citizens and organisations possible. After all we collectively already paid for the collection of that data.

I propose a session where participants present what's going on in their respective countries to open up government data.

In the Netherlands I have been working together with James Burke in the past months on a project for the Dutch Ministry for the Interior to give open government data a small boost from the bottom-up. This project finished in April 2009, and is now being turned into a network-sourced effort.

Next to creating two easy examples of what can be done reusing government data, we wrote a guide for civil servants that want to open up data to the public on how to win over their colleagues and beat the current culture of keeping things intransparant, as well as started a network/community effort that aims to change government culture from within concerning open government data.

In the session I would like to not only briefly introduce our work in the Netherlands, but also see short intros by others working on opening up government data. So we can explore how we can strengthen our efforts together. Assuming there are others coming to Reboot who are active in this field.

5 comments

Data for the Swedish healthconsumer

In Sweden we are a small start-up trying to speed up the transition from passive patients to active healthconsumers by providing and visualizing governent data for decision making. This has of course a number of complications and we´d be happy to share and make a interesting complement to the Dutch initiative above.

9 June 09, 13:18 Pontus Österberg, 9 June 09, 13:18

OpenCorporations

I would be happy to present a brief thumbnail of my experiences in the fall of 2008 with attempting to improve access to data about corporations in my home province of Prince Edward Island, a tale I summarized the failure of here.

21 June 09, 20:20 Peter Rukavina, 21 June 09, 20:20

Great!

Peter, Pontus, it will be great to have you on board for the session. We're scheduled on day 1 in the second session after the key-note.
Let's meet up on Thursday morning before the programme starts to shortly discuss the session.

23 June 09, 21:31 Ton Zijlstra, 23 June 09, 21:31

Project writeup

I just reworded my writeup on the two websites in English. Might be interesting in light of the discussion:
alper.nl/dingen/2009/06/friendlier-and-more-open-government-data/

25 June 09, 01:23 Alper Çugun, 25 June 09, 01:23

Re: Great!

Ton Zijlstra, 23 June 09, 21:31
Peter, Pontus, it will be great to have you on
board for the session. We're scheduled on day 1
in the second session after the key-note.

ton, this is pontus from sweden. tried to send you a mail but i bounced.

unfortunately i have bad news. i will not arrive to copenhagen until tomorrow. i missed signing up for the event and just recently got a ticket from a german guy who couldn't attend. in the meantime i had to make up my mind, and i gambled that the open government data session would be on friday... sorry for the inconvenience.
bottomline is, i will not be there with you guys today, but will try to look you up tomorrow. i've figured out that you are involved whit a whole other bunch of stuff as well, so maybe there won't be much time left, but i'll make a shot at it.

speaking of government data, today i have my first official meeting with the social ministry of sweden. let's see how that work out.

pontus

25 June 09, 09:00 Pontus Österberg, 25 June 09, 09:00