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by Jonathan Gray

The future of open data in the UK: what we hope the Shakespeare review says

May 14, 2013 in Open Data, Policy

Tomorrow morning will see the release of a major new review on how to make the most out the UK’s Public Sector Information authored by Stephan Shakespeare, founder of opinion polls company YouGov.

Given our role in advocating open data in the UK for many years, we’re very keen to see what Shakespeare says. Here are a few of our thoughts about what we hope to see in the review.

Strong commitment to open data as the default for UK Public Sector Information.

On the back of President Obama’s recent Executive Order announced last week that says public information in the US should be “open and machine readable” by default, we hope Stephan Shakespeare’s review will urge similarly strong support for open data in the UK.

In particular we hope he pushes the UK to do more to open up raw data currently sold by trading funds, and key datasets like the Postcode Address File (which is a crucial part of any website or app which involves putting things on maps).

Supporting standards to make open data more usable and useful

We hope that the review contains recommendations about developing and promoting better standards to make open data more usable and useful.

From spending information, to carbon emissions data, to health data, we hope to see initiatives to ensure greater standardisation of public information across central and local government to lower barriers to reuse. (This point was also alluded to in a article on the Guardian published earlier today.)

We’ve started work in this direction with our Data Protocols, but we’d really like to see the UK government doing more in this area. Given its role in the Open Government Partnership, it could help to create standards that could be used not just in the UK, but around the world.

Open data isn’t just about money

While we expect the economic potential of open data to be a major focus area for tomorrow’s review, we hope Shakespeare recognises that open data is not just about money.

Making essential information easier to use can bring about many different kinds of value – not just those that can be directly measured in pounds and pence. For example, greater accountability, innovative digital public services for citizens, and new forms of civic participation, journalism and campaigning. The impact of open data isn’t a magical rapid increase in jobs and economic value, but in many cases will be over a longer term, and will include non-monetary gains such as fairness and equality.

Next month, the US’s National Day of Civic Hacking plans to mobilise over 5,000 developers to address a variety of different challenges. The Data Journalism Handbook is full of examples of how journalists are using data to improve the news.

The UK has been a world leader in using data to benefit society – from projects like mySociety‘s TheyWorkForYou, which enables people to track what their MPs say in parliament, to pioneering data driven reportage from the likes of the Guardian. We hope the review also recognises this, and recommends that the UK does more to support it.

If you’re interested in open data and you’d like to join our global community of open government data advocates, you can join our open-government mailing list:

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Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

We need open carbon emissions data now!

May 13, 2013 in Access to Information, Campaigning, Featured, Featured Project, Open Data, Policy, WG Sustainability, Working Groups

Last week the average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million, a level which is said to be unprecedented in human history.

Leading scientists and policy makers say that we should be aiming for no more than 350 parts per million to avoid catastrophic runaway climate change.

But what’s in a number? Why is the increase from 399 to 400 significant?

While the actual change is mainly symbolic (and some commentators have questioned whether we’re hovering above or just below 400), the real story is that we are badly failing to cut emissions fast enough.

Given the importance of this number, which represents humanity’s progress towards tackling one of the biggest challenges we currently face – the fact that it has been making the news around the world is very welcome indeed.

Why don’t we hear about the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from politicians or the press more often? While there are regularly headlines about inflation, interest and unemployment, numbers about carbon emissions rarely receive the level of attention that they deserve.

We want this to change. And we think that having more timely and more detailed information about carbon emissions is essential if we are to keep up pressure on the world’s governments and companies to make the cuts that the world needs.

As our Advisory Board member Hans Rosling puts it, carbon emissions should be on the world’s dashboard.

Over the coming months we are going to be planning and undertaking activities to advocate for the release of more timely and granular carbon emissions data. We are also going to be working with our global network to catalyse projects which use it to communicate the state of the world’s carbon emissions to the public.

If you’d like to join us, you can follow #OpenCO2 on Twitter or sign up to our open-sustainability mailing list:

Image credit: Match smoke by AMagill on Flickr. Released under Creative Commons Attribution license.

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Avatar of Rufus Pollock

by Rufus Pollock

Government Data Open and Machine Readable by Default Announces President Obama

May 10, 2013 in News, Open Data, Policy

There was big news for open data yesterday with a new Executive Order announced by President Obama. The order lays out the general principles that open, machine readable, data are the “new default”. (We note the Open Definition already includes machine readability in the definition of open data). There will a new Open Data Policy which will require U.S. government agencies to conform to standards “to collect or create information in a way that supports downstream information processing and dissemination activities”. Below, we summarize the key points.

Open By Default

The order reiterates some of the key reasons for openness and makes clear that open is the default:

To promote continued job growth, Government efficiency, and the social good that can be gained from opening Government data to the public, the default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable. Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness …

Development of an “Open Data Policy”

Sec. 2. Open Data Policy. (a) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in consultation with the Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), shall issue an Open Data Policy to advance the management of Government information as an asset

Clear set of best practices and tools

[Section 3] (a) Within 30 days of the issuance of the Open Data Policy, the CIO and CTO shall publish an open online repository of tools and best practices to assist agencies in integrating the Open Data Policy into their operations in furtherance of their missions. The CIO and CTO shall regularly update this online repository as needed to ensure it remains a resource to facilitate the adoption of open data practices.

Build the policy into procurement

(b) Within 90 days of the issuance of the Open Data Policy, the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, … to identify and initiate implementation of measures to support the integration of the Open Data Policy requirements into Federal acquisition and grant-making processes

By building open data release as a default into procurement this should greatly simplify open publication and remove arguments against release based on cost and complexity.

Assessment

Implementation will be tracked and assessed:

[Section 3] (c) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Chief Performance Officer (CPO) shall work with the President’s Management Council to establish a Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goal to track implementation of the Open Data Policy.

In a follow-up we’ll be providing more detailed analysis of the full Open Data Policy memorandum including plans for the new data.gov and its use of CKAN.

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Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

What We Hope the Digital Public Library of America Will Become

April 17, 2013 in Bibliographic, Featured, Free Culture, Open Content, Open GLAM, Open Humanities, Policy, Public Domain

Tomorrow is the official launch date for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

If you’ve been following it, you’ll know that it has the long term aim of realising “a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all”.

More specifically, Robert Darnton, Director of the Harvard University Library and one of the DPLA’s leading advocates to date, recently wrote in the New York Review of Books, that the DPLA aims to:

make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of charge

What will this practically mean? How will the DPLA translate this broad mission into action? And to what extent will they be aligned with other initiatives to encourage cultural heritage institutions to open up their holdings, like our own OpenGLAM or Wikimedia’s GLAM-WIKI?

Here are a few of our thoughts on what we hope the DPLA will become.

A force for open metadata

The DPLA is initially focusing its efforts on making existing digital collections from across the US searchable and browsable from a single website.

Much like Europe’s digital library, Europeana, this will involve collecting information about works from a variety of institutions and linking to digital copies of these works that are spread across the web. A super-catalogue, if you will, that includes information about and links to copies of all the things in all the other catalogues.

Happily, we’ve already heard that the DPLA is releasing all of this data about cultural works that they will be collecting using the CC0 legal tool – meaning that anyone can use, share or build on this information without restriction.

We hope they continue to proactively encourage institutions to explicitly open up metadata about their works, and to release this as machine-readable raw data.

Back in 2007, we – along with the late Aaron Swartz – urged the Library of Congress to play a leading role in opening up information about cultural works. So we’re pleased that it looks like DPLA could take on the mantle.

But what about the digital copies themselves?

A force for an open digital public domain

The DPLA has spoken about using fair use provisions to increase access to copyrighted materials, and has even intimated that they might want to try to change or challenge the state of the law to grant further exceptions or limitations to copyright for educational or noncommercial purposes (trying to succeed where Google Books failed). All of this is highly laudable.

But what about works which have fallen out of copyright and entered the public domain?

Just as they are doing with metadata about works, we hope that the DPLA takes a principled approach to digital copies of works which have entered the public domain, encouraging institutions to publish these without legal or technical restrictions.

We hope they become proactive evangelists for a digital public domain which is open as in the Open Definition, meaning that digital copies of books, paintings, recordings, films and other artefacts are free for anyone to use and share – without restrictive clickwrap agreements, digital rights management technologies or digital watermarks to impose ownership and inhibit further use or sharing.

The Europeana Public Domain Charter, in part based on and inspired by the Public Domain Manifesto, might serve as a model here. In particular, the DPLA might take inspiration from the following sections:

What is in the Public Domain needs to remain in the Public Domain. Exclusive control over Public Domain works cannot be re-established by claiming exclusive rights in technical reproductions of the works, or by using technical and or contractual measures to limit access to technical reproductions of such works. Works that are in the Public Domain in analogue form continue to be in the Public Domain once they have been digitised.

The lawful user of a digital copy of a Public Domain work should be free to (re-) use, copy and modify the work. Public Domain status of a work guarantees the right to re-use, modify and make reproductions and this must not be limited through technical and or contractual measures. When a work has entered the Public Domain there is no longer a legal basis to impose restrictions on the use of that work.

The DPLA could create their own principles or recommendations for the digital publication of public domain works (perhaps recommending legal tools like the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark) as well as ensuring that new content that they digitise is explicitly marked as open.

Speaking at our OpenGLAM US launch last month, Emily Gore, the DPLA’s Director for Content, said that this is definitely something that they’d be thinking about over the coming months. We hope they adopt a strong and principled position in favour of openness, and help to raise awareness amongst institutions and the general public about the importance of a digital public domain which is open for everyone.

A force for collaboration around the cultural commons

Open knowledge isn’t just about stuff being able to freely move around on networks of computers and devices. It is also about people.

We think there is a significant opportunity to involve students, scholars, artists, developers, designers and the general public in the curation and re-presentation of our cultural and historical past.

Rather than just having vast pools of information about works from US collections – wouldn’t it be great if there were hand picked anthologies of works by Emerson or Dickinson curated by leading scholars? Or collections of songs or paintings relating to a specific region, chosen by knowledgable local historians who know about allusions and references that others might miss?

An ‘open by default’ approach would enable use and engagement with digital content that breathes a life into it that it might not otherwise have – from new useful and interesting websites, mobile applications or digital humanities projects, to creative remixing or screenings of out of copyright films with new live soundtracks (like Air’s magical reworking of Georges Méliès’s 1902 film Le Voyage Dans La Lune).

We hope that the DPLA takes a proactive approach to encouraging the use of the digital material that it federates, to ensure that it is as impactful and valuable to as many people as possible.

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Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

Will Obama’s new $100m brain mapping project be open access?

April 4, 2013 in Open Access, Open Science, Policy

On Tuesday President Obama unveiled a new $100 million research initiative to map the human brain.

The BRAIN (Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative will “accelerate the development and application of new technologies that will enable researchers to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought”.

As well as trying to vastly improve scientific understanding of “the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears”, it is hoped that this research will enable new forms of prevention and treatment for conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism and epilepsy.

In his speech, Obama made several comparisons between the BRAIN initiative and the Human Genome Project, an initiative which saw unprecedented international collaboration and data sharing between research centres around the world to map the tens of thousands of genes of the human genome. Dr Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and is the current Director of the National Institutes of Health, spoke alongside Obama at the announcement.

While there has been no explicit announcement about whether or not the BRAIN initiative will be open access (and while there are obviously difficult ethical and privacy issues in this field), we hope that it will follow in the footsteps of the Human Genome Project’s pioneering approach to data sharing – which saw data being placed into the public domain by default, without restrictions on its use and redistribution. This helped to minimise duplication, maximise synergy and ultimately to accelerate the pace of research in this area.

There was a rival initiative to the Human Genome Project from a private company called Celera, which aimed to create its own subscription database of the human genome, and to patent over 300 genes. Martin Bobrow, a representative for the Human Genome Project, later said: “Celera’s requirements seemed to amount to them establishing an effective monopoly over the human genome.” If they had succeeded the consequences to scientific research and innovation in this area could have been devastating.

With its mixture of public and private investment and public and private research organisations, all with different interests and different approaches to sharing, there is a danger that Obama’s new brain mapping initiative could fracture into silos of separate researchers and groups, duplicating work, competing against each other and claiming exclusive control and commercialisation over the fruits of their research.

Given the strong focus on US innovation in President Obama’s speech, it is also not clear how the initiative will collaborate with other initiatives such as the European Commission’s recently announced €1 billion Human Brain Project, which looks to have at least some overlapping aims and goals to Obama’s new initiative.

While the EC will be requiring open access to research funded by their Horizon 2020 programme, it is not yet clear whether the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)’s recent announcement in support of open access will apply to the BRAIN initiative.

We hope that President Obama’s new brain mapping initiatives will adopt a strong and principled commitment to open access and international collaboration, so that the world can benefit from accelerated and more impactful research around mapping the human brain in the same way that it has with the human genome.

If you’re interested in following our work in this area, you can join our open-science discussion list by filling in your details in the form below:

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Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

“We are entering an era of open science” says EU Vice President Neelie Kroes at launch of new global Research Data Alliance

March 21, 2013 in Open Access, Open Data, Open Science, Policy, WG Open Data in Science

Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, gave a talk earlier this week renewing the EU’s strong, principled support for open science.

Speaking at the launch of a new global Research Data Alliance, she said that we are entering a new “era of open science”, which will be “good for citizens, good for scientists and good for society”.

She explicitly highlighted the transformative potential of open access, open data, open software and open educational resources – mentioning the EU’s policy requiring open access to all publications and data resulting from EU funded research.

She also alluded to the EU’s work encouraging national funding bodies to adopt similar approach to publicly funded research, and recent policy developments in the US and Australia.

The Research Data Alliance says it “aims to accelerate and facilitate research data sharing and exchange” and currently lists a number of working areas such as metadata harmonisation and legal interoperability.

While there does not yet appear to be an explicit focus on open data per se, we hope that the new organisation will take a principled, ‘open by default’ approach to data sharing, in line with the Panton Principles, and commensurate with Commissioner Kroes’s speech.

As always, our Open Science Working Group will continue to monitor and engage with relevant initiatives and policy developments in this area as they unfold. If you’d like to help us you can join our open-science discussion list, by signing up below:



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Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

We Need an Open Database of Clinical Trials

February 5, 2013 in Access to Information, Campaigning, Featured, Open Data, Open Science, Open/Closed, Policy

The award winning science writer and physician Ben Goldacre recently launched a major campaign to open up the results of clinical trials.

The AllTrials initiative calls for all clinical trials to be reported and for the “full methods and the results” of each trial to be published.

Currently negative results are poorly recorded and positive results are overhyped, leading to what Goldacre calls ‘research fraud’, misleading doctors about the drugs they are prescribing and misleading patients about the drugs they are taking.

The Open Knowledge Foundation is an organisational supporter of AllTrials, and we encourage you to sign and share the petition if you have not already done so:

There have been some big wins in the past 48 hours. The lead legislator for a new EU Clinical Trials Regulation recently came out in favour of transparency for clinical trials. Today GlaxoSmithKline announced their support for the campaign, which, as Goldacre says, is “huge, and internationally huge”.

As well as continuing to push for stronger policies and practises that support the release of information about clinical trials, we would like to see a public repository of reports and results that doctors, patients and researchers can access and add to. We need an open database of clinical trials.

Over the past few days we’ve been corresponding with Ben and others on the AllTrials about how we might be able to work together to create such a database – building on the prototyping work that was presented at last year’s Strata event.

In the mean time, you can watch the TED talk if you haven’t seen it already – and help us to make some noise about the petition!


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Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

Help Us to Cultivate the Digital Commons!

January 24, 2013 in Featured, Network, OKFN Local, Our Work, Policy, Working Groups

At the Open Knowledge Foundation we work to cultivate a global commons of digital material that everyone is free to use and enjoy.

This digital commons includes everything from open data about carbon emissions or spending from governments around the world; to open access research in the sciences, the humanities, and many other disciplines; to public domain works from galleries, libraries, archives and museums.

We want to change institutional policies so that public information, publicly funded research and public domain cultural works are common public goods that everyone can benefit from.

We want to change sociocultural norms and individual behaviour so that more people voluntarily open up and are willing to collaborate around the knowledge they create.

And finally we want to increase the impact of the commons on the world by encouraging more people to use open material to change the world for the better. We want to help more people to translate digital bits and bytes into knowledge, and knowledge into action.

In order to make progress towards these things we need a proactive global community to promote open knowledge around the world, across different domains, disciplines, fields and institutions.

We Need You!

In the last few months we’ve been looking at how we can better support local and domain specific affinity groups around the world. If you share our vision and want to work with us to realise it, then you can now:

What Can You Do?

We’re always looking for energetic and talented people to help us to promote the idea of open knowledge, and to think of new ways of putting it to work to improve the world. Regardless of your background or expertise there are many different things that you can do to help. For example, you could:

Get In Touch

Whether you want to help build a useful website, help to run a campaign, or connect with other people interested in the digital commons in your field or in your region, please join and introduce yourself on the relevant local group or working group mailing list, or join the taskforce (or drop us a line if you’d like to help out with anything else).

Many of our key working group and local group coordinators will be convening in Cambridge next week to discuss and plot how we can continue to build a stronger and better connected global network to support the digital commons. More on this very soon!


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Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

Goodbye Aaron Swartz – and Long Live Your Legacy

January 14, 2013 in Access to Information, Bibliographic, Campaigning, Featured, News, Open Access, Open Data, Open Government Data, Policy

Aaron Swartz, coder, writer, archivist and activist, took his own life in New York on Friday.

Aaron worked tirelessly to open up and maximise the societal impact of information in three areas which are central to our work at the Foundation: public domain cultural works, public sector information, and open access to publicly funded research.

He was one of the original architects behind the Internet Archive’s Open Library project, which aims to create ‘one web page for every book’. While he was there we compared notes about trying to automatically estimate which works are in the public domain in different countries around the world.

This was part of a broader vision to enable public access to the public domain, and to ensure that digitisation initiatives result in open digital copies of public domain works that everyone is free to use and enjoy, not just copies owned and protected by large corporations who might sell or restrict access to the world’s heritage.

Around this time Aaron and I met in San Francisco to co-draft a petition to the Library of Congress to encourage them to take a leading role in opening up data from the world’s libraries and memory institutions. This was several years before a wave of institutions started explicitly opening up data about their holdings.

We remained in contact regarding his work on open government data in the US. Aaron was involved in drafting the highly influential 8 principles for open government data. We wanted to try to better coordinate developments on either side of the Atlantic.

Later he was in the papers for downloading around a fifth of the US government’s huge Public Access to Court Records (PACER) system, around 780 gigabytes, and releasing it for free to the public (access was usually charged by the page) – which earned him an FBI file.

In his 2008 Guerilla Open Access Manifesto Aaron argued that “the world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations” and, “in the grand tradition of civil disobedience”, urged internet users to “fight back”:

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

In 2010 he founded Demand Progress, which helped to mobilise over a million people in response to proposed legislation like the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA).

In 2011 he again hit the headlines when he was arrested for downloading roughly 4 million subscription-only academic articles from JSTOR by placing a laptop in a computer cupboard at MIT and using this to gain unauthorised access to the JSTOR service. The prosecution alleged that he intended to make these articles freely available on the web.

Last September the US Federal Government raised the felony count from four to thirteen, which meant that Aaron was potentially facing a total of 50+ years and a fine in the area of $4 million for his actions. His family suggested that the case was a factor in his death – and blamed the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office for “intimidation and prosecutorial overreach” and MIT for “refus[ing] to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles”. The president of MIT has just announced that he has ordered an investigation into their role in Aaron’s prosecution.

As Peter Eckersley from the Electronic Frontier Foundation commented on Saturday:

While his methods were provocative, the goal that Aaron died fighting for — freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it — is one that we should all support.

While Aaron was deeply involved in all kinds of technical, scholarly and organising activities to promote an open digital commons and an open internet – from helping to develop RSS 1.0 and Markdown, to early sketches of the semantic web with some of its pioneers and work on the first technical implementations of the Creative Commons licenses – he also never lost sight of the bigger picture, of what it was all for. He was a talented coder and knew how to take a principled stance, but he was never one to get lost in detail or dogma. From his writings about how data-driven transparency initiatives are not enough to effect change in themselves, to his guide to developing software that addresses real needs, he was always aware of the fact that using the information, technology and the internet to change the world is not easy, and requires graft, skill, scrutiny, critical reflection and taking risks.

Aaron’s passing is a tremendously sad and significant loss. Long live his legacy.


To find out more about Aaron’s life and works, you can look at his writings and the memorial site set up by his family. You can also read tributes from Tim Berners-Lee, Cory Doctorow, Brewster Kahle, Lawrence Lessig, and Erik Moeller, and read obituaries and news articles on the BBC, the Economist, Forbes, Gigaom, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Observer, Techdirt, The Telegraph, Vice and Wired. In tribute, hundreds of academics have started tweeting links to their research papers using the hashtag #pdftribute. The Internet Archive has started an Aaron Swartz Collection.


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Avatar of Regards Citoyens

by Regards Citoyens

Let’s defend Open Formats for Public Sector Information in Europe!

December 3, 2012 in Access to Information, Campaigning, Open Data, Open Government Data, Open Standards, Open/Closed, Policy, WG EU Open Data, WG Open Government Data

Following some remarks from Richard Swetenham from the European Commission, we made a few changes relative to the trialogue process and the coming steps: the trialogue will start its meetings on 17th December and it is therefore already very useful to call on our governments to support Open Formats!

When we work on building all these amazing democratic transparency collaborative tools all over the world, all of us, Open Data users and producers, struggle with these incredibly frustrating closed or unexploitable formats under which public data is unfortunately so often released: XLS, PDF, DOC, JPG, completely misformatted tables, and so on.

The EU PSI directive revision is a chance to push for a clear Open Formats definition!

As part of Neelie Kroes’s Digital Agenda, the European Commission recently proposed a revision of the Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive widening the scope of the existing directive to encourage public bodies to open up the data they produce as part of their own activities.

The revision will be discussed at the European Parliament (EP), and this is the citizen’s chance to advocate for a clear definition of the Open Formats under which public sector information (PSI) should be released.

We believe at Regards Citoyens that having a proper definition of Open Formats within the EU PSI directive revision would be a fantastic help to citizens and contribute to economic innovation. We believe such a definition can be summed-up to in two simple rules inspired by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s OpenDefinition principles:

  • being platform independant and machine-readable without any legal, financial or technical restriction;
  • being the result of an openly developped process in which all users can actually be part of the specifications evolution.

Those are the principles we advocated in a policy note on Open Formats we published last week and sent individually to all Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from the committee voting on the revision of the PSI directive last thursday.

Good news: the first rule was adopted! But the second one was not. How did that work?

ITRE vote on Nov 29th: what happened and how?

EP meetingA meeting at the European Parliament
CC-BY-ND EPP Group

The European parliamentary process first involves a main committee in charge of preparing the debates before the plenary session, in our case the Industry, Research and Energy committee (ITRE). Its members met on 29th November around 10am to vote on the PSI revision amongst other files.

MEPs can propose amendments to the revision beforehand, but, to speed up the process, the European Parliament works with what is called “compromise amendments” (CAs): the committee chooses a rapporteur leading the file in its name and each political group gets a “shadow rapporteur” to work together with the main rapporteur. They all study the proposed amendments together and try to sum them up in a few consensual ones called CAs, hence leading MEPs to pull away some amendments when they consider their concerns met. During the committee meeting, both kinds of amendment are voted on in accordance with predefined voting-list indicating the rapporteur’s recommandations.

Regarding Open Formats, everything relied on a proposition to add to the directive‘s 2nd article a paragraph providing a clear definition of what an Open Format actually is. The rapporteurs work led to a pretty good compromise amendment 18, which speaks pretty much for itself:

« An open format is one that is platform independent, machine readable, and made available to the public without legal, technical or financial restrictions that would impede the re-use of that information. »

This amendment was adopted, meaning this change will be proposed as a new amendment to all MEPs during the plenary debate. Given that it has the support of the rapporteur in the name of the responsible committee, it stands a good chance of being carried.

Regarding the open development process condition, MEP Amelia Andersdotter, shadow rapporteur for the European Parliament Greens group, maintained and adapted to this new definition her amendment 65:

« "open format" means that the format’s specification is maintained by a not-for-profit organisation the membership of which is not contingent on membership fees; its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties; the format specification document is available freely; the intellectual property of the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis. »

Even though it also got recommanded for approval by the main rapporteur, unfortunately the ALDE and EPP groups were not ready to support it yet and it got rejected.

Watching the 12 seconds during which the Open Formats issues were voted is a strange experience to anyone not familiar with the European Parliament, since most of the actual debate happens beforehand between the different rapporteurs, the committee meeting mainly consists of a succession of raised hand votes calls, which are occasionally electronically checked. Therefore, there are no public individual votes or records of these discussions available and the vote happens very quickly.

What next? Can we do anything?

Now that the ITRE committee has voted, its report should soon be made available online

As the European institutions work as a tripartite organisation, the text adopted by the ITRE committee will now be transferred to both the European Commission and Council for approval. This includes a trialogue procedure in which a consensus towards a common text must be driven. This is an occasion to call on our respective national governments to push in favor of Open Formats in order toc maintain and improve the definition which the EP already adopted.

The text which comes out of the tripartite debate will be discussed in plenary session, planned at the moment for 11th March 2013. Until noon on the Wednesday preceding the plenary, MEPs will still have the possibility to propose new amendments to be voted on at plenary: they can do so either as a whole political group, or as a group of at least 40 different MEPs from any groups.

Possible next steps to advocate Open Formats could therefore be the following:

  • Call on our national governments to push in favor of Open Formats;
  • Keep up-to-date with documents and procedures from the European Parliament: ParlTrack offers e-mail alerts on the dossier;
  • Whenever the proposition of new amendments towards the plenary debate is opened, we should contact our respective national MEPs from all political groups and urge them to propose amendments requiring Open Formats to be based on an open development process. Having multiple amendments coming from different political groups would certainly help MEPs realize this is not a partisan issue;
  • When the deadline for proposing amendments is reached, we should call on our MEPs by email, phone calls or Tweets to vote for such amendments and possibly against some opposed ones. In order to allow anyone to easily and freely phone their MEPs, we’re thinking about reusing La Quadrature du Net‘s excellent PiPhone tool for EU citizen advocacy.

In any case, contacting MEPs to raise concerns on Open Formats policies can of course always be useful at all times before and after the plenary debates. Policy papers, amendments proposals, vulgarisation documents, blogposts, open-letters, a petititon, tweets, … It can all help!

To conclude, we would like to stress once again that Regards Citoyens is an entirely voluntary organisation without much prior experience with the European Parliament. This means help and expertise is much appreciated! Let’s get all ready to defend Open Formats for European Open Data in a few weeks!


Regards Citoyens — CC-BY-SA

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