Open Knowledge Foundation Blog

We’re pleased to announce that a new report on access to information and open government data is open for consultation! From the announcement:

Access Info Europe and the Open Knowledge Foundation, in collaboration with the Open Society Institute Information Program, are holding a public consultation on open government data and the right of access to information.

This consultation is based on a new report “Beyond Access: Open Government Data and the ‘Right to Reuse’” produced as a result of research into the open government data and access to information movements. The report identifies the practical, technical and legal challenges facing these movements. The report is based on discussions with activists about the main issues to be address in the next couple of years, questions such as whether a right of access is linked to a “right to reuse” the data received.

You can download the full report here:

• ODT
• PDF
• DOC

Consultation: we would like to hear your comments on the “Beyond Access” report.

• Did we miss any important initiatives?
• Are there issues we should include?
• Are you doing something you’d like us to capture in the report?
• Do you agree with our findings and recommendations?

There are three ways to make comments:

1. Fill in our questionnaire on the report by clicking here.
2. Make comments on the individual paragraphs at WritetoReply.org/beyondaccess
3. Write to us at beyond@access-info.org

Consultation closes on Monday 11 October 2010

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Today the New Zealand Government announced the NZGOAL framework for opening up material published by public bodies:

The New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework (NZGOAL) was approved by Cabinet on 5 July 2010 as government guidance for State Services agencies to follow when releasing copyright works and non-copyright material for re-use by third parties. It standardises the licensing of government copyright works for re-use using Creative Commons licences and recommends the use of ‘no-known rights’ statements for non-copyright material. It is widely recognised that re-use of this material by individuals and organisations may have significant creative and economic benefit for New Zealand.

NZGOAL does not apply to information or works containing personal or other sensitive information, except for its guidance on anonymising datasets which, once stripped of personal information, might be licensed or released.

State Services agencies should make their copyright works which are or may be of interest or use to people available online for re-use on the most open of licensing terms within NZGOAL – the Creative Commons Attribution (BY) licence – unless a restriction applies. Likewise they should provide public online access to non-copyright material that is or may be of interest to people, using a ‘no-known rights’ statement.

NZGOAL provides a series of open licensing and open access principles for copyright works and non-copyright material. These principles address, among other things, issues relating to open licensing, open access, creativity, authenticity, non-discrimination, open format and charging. It also guides agencies through the questions they need to consider before releasing material for re-use.

One of the key points is the adoption of the 100% open Creative Commons Attribution license as the default for government information:

Open access to copyright works with Creative Commons Attribution (BY) licence as default

26 Unless a restriction in paragraph 29 applies, State Services agencies should make their copyright works which are or may be of interest or use to people available for re-use on the most open of licensing terms available within NZGOAL (the Open Licensing Principle).6 To the greatest extent practicable, such works should be made available online. The most open of licensing terms available within NZGOAL is the Creative Commons Attribution (BY) licence.

They also explicitly discourage noncommercial licenses to make sure that open government data can be used (and contributed to!) by commercial users — a point which is also made in the Open Knowledge Definition:

Non-discrimination

33 Except where necessary to protect their own or others’ commercial or other interests, agencies should not discriminate, when selecting an NZGOAL licence, between individual, not-for-profit and commercial uses of the relevant copyright works (the Non-Discrimination Principle).

Finally they urge departments to publish in formats which make the data easy to reuse (machine readable ones?):

Formats

49 When licensing copyright works and releasing non-copyright material for re-use, agencies should:

a. consider the formats in which they ought to be released, taking into account, where relevant, the wishes of those who will or are likely to re-use the works or material;

b. release them in the formats they know or believe are best suited for interoperability and re-use and are searchable and indexable by search engines; and

c. in the case of datasets, add their details into data.govt.nz.

50 When releasing works or material in proprietary formats, agencies should also release the works or material in open, non-proprietary formats (the Open Format Principle).

You can read the full document online here:

• http://www.e.govt.nz/policy/nzgoal/html-version

Amazing work — and we hope that other governments will take note and follow suit!

If you’re interested in open government data, you can join in discussion on our open-government list which includes representatives from key initiatives around the world, both within and outside government.

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The following guest post is from Katleen Janssen, researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Groups on EU Open Data and Open Government Data.

In Belgium – and I can imagine this is the case in more countries – we look at data.gov.uk with a mix of admiration and envy. The goal of the PSI directive to stimulate any re-use of public sector information is taken to heart and translated into a portal opening up large numbers of data sets for any type of use.

While in the UK and in many other EU Member States (e.g. Netherlands, Denmark, Spain), the awareness is growing that the open availability of public sector data can stimulate innovation and increase accountability, some other countries are still turning a blind eye to the opportunities that open access to public sector data can bring. A big part of the problem seems to be culture. Public bodies do not realize the value of their data for others, or they are worried that their data will be interpreted wrongly or used for wrongful purposes, putting their reputation on the line. In addition, due to lack of resources or lack of vision, some governments were satisfied with just transposing the directive in a law – to never look at it again, let alone develop an actual implementation policy or guidelines for the public bodies. Left to their own devices, some public bodies have risen to the occasion and developed a well-working re-use policy, while others have not bothered, or may simply not even be aware that there is such a concept as ‘re-use’.

As bad as I make the Member States sound, I must admit that they did not have an easy job in transposing and implementing the PSI directive, as this directive has left many difficult and unclear issues for the Member States to sort out themselves. Even the concept of re-use itself raises a lot of issues, particularly in relationship with the citizens’ right to access information under national freedom of information legislation. The PSI directive has its roots in economic considerations and was developed to support the information industry, and European Commission representatives have often emphasized its economic character, the fact remains that the definition of re-use in the PSI directive is much broader: “the use by persons or legal entities of documents held by public sector bodies, for commercial or non-commercial purposes other than the initial purpose within the public task for which the documents were produced”(article 2.4). Hence, it does not only involve commercial use, but also any other use as long as it is outside of the public task.

Considering this broad definition, it is not surprising that some of the Member States linked re-use immediately to their existing legislation on freedom of information (FOI) and decided to transpose the directive by amending their laws on access to government information. Some Member States felt that this legislation already covered all they needed to transpose the PSI directive (e.g. Sweden, Finland, Poland). Of course, access and re-use are closely related, in the sense that public sector data has to be accessible before you can re-use it, but they have a different background: access is rooted in traditions of democracy and public participation, while re-use has an economic slant and is intended to stimulate the common and internal market. These two different mindsets have only rarely been recognized by government, public bodies or appeal bodies. One of the few attempts to explain the distinction was made in 2004 by the UK Advisory Panel on Crown Copyright (which has been replaced by APPSI since then):

Although the subject matter (public information) and the broad scope (public bodies) of these instruments are similar, the underpinning policies are quite different. The FOI Act seeks to promote greater transparency and openness in the conduct of public affairs, while the PSI Directive recognises the value, and aims to encourage the commercial exploitation, of public information. The focus of the FOI Act is enhancing the rights of individuals in a democratic society. At the heart of the PSI Directive is the smoother running of the internal market; the stimulation of the European information industry so it can compete more effectively in the global marketplace.

Due to these differences, incorporation of access and re-use into the same legislation is not a simple task, and some implementations have been criticized for trying (e.g. by Mireille van Eechoud and Marc De Vries in the Netherlands). However, at least these countries have realized that there is a link between both and they should be applauded for seeing the relationship between them. The main problem with this practice is not the incorporation into one text, but rather the incorporation into one text without the incorporation into one information policy. If no attention is paid to the coherence between different information policies, they end up being very difficult to apply, or in the worst case end up contradicting each other. An example: in France and Belgium, the freedom of information legislation contained a prohibition to use the documents that were obtained under this legislation for commercial purposes. In Belgium, this article was abolished during the implementation of the PSI directive, to ensure that commercial use would not be hindered. While this was a nice attempt to harmonize access and re-use, it actually had an opposite effect. For years, the article had been interpreted in a way that prohibited commercial use of the documents as they were, but any reworking of the data or value-adding was allowed, without any extra conditions. The introduction of the PSI legislation changed this and made such re-use also subject to the freedom of the public bodies to decide whether they allowed re-use or not. Hence, the PSI legislation actually decreased the possibilities for re-use. In addition, it limited the extent and interpretation of what you can do with information obtained under access legislation.

In my opinion, that is one of the biggest issues of the PSI legislation: where does access stop and where does re-use begin? How are public bodies supposed to know which rules they have to apply to a request for information? The example that I usually give, is journalists: during the history of freedom of information legislation (in Sweden it dates from 1766), they have been among the main users of FOI to obtain information from the government and the public sector. However, the news is also big business: newspapers and news channels have to be competitive and gain revenues. So while traditionally journalists have always obtained their information under FOI, if you want to apply the PSI rules to the letter, they would be re-using the information, possibly even for a commercial purpose. This could mean dealing with licences, fees and use conditions. However, journalists are not the only example of possible confusion between re-use and access. The development of Web 2.0 could potentially increase this confusion exponentially. Like Mayo and Steinberg said in their Power of Information Review, a lot of new and innovative services are created by citizens and organisations on their websites, blogs, fora, etc (e.g. mtraffic, Openstreetmap, Where does my money go?, Fixmystreet). These services are re-using public sector data, but before the PSI legislation, they might have already been possible under FOI legislation, due their role in increasing public participation and democratic accountability.

Initiatives like data.gov.uk, however fantastic they are, increase the grey zone between access and re-use, as their aim with releasing public sector data is not only economic growth and innovation (like the PSI directive), but also increasing accountability and transparency (what FOI legislation was originally intended for). However, the enthusiasm and acclaim with which it has been achieved shows that maybe this is the way to go: forget about dogmatic issues like the distinction between re-using PSI and accessing it under FOI, and just think in terms of making public sector data open to anyone who wants to use it. This entails having a streamlined information policy that takes into account all the possible uses that could be made of public sector data.

However, such an overarching policy may work if everything is available free of charge and with hardly any use conditions, for example under a CC-zero licence or data.gov.uk’s open licence conditions, but it may have unwelcome results in countries or public bodies that wish to maintain a more complicated licensing policy with charges for using the data. We may not like such charges and conditions, but the truth still is that some public bodies creating interesting data have to earn their own money, and will have to continue doing so unless the government sees the importance of their data and starts to fund it from the central budget. In such cases, a combined policy for access and re-use might rather lead to the public having to pay or having to sign a licence for getting the data in more occasions than under the traditional FOI legislation. Considering the fundamental character of the right to access government information, this should be avoided at all time. Any information policy that intends to do away with the distinction between FOI and re-use should start from the largest common denominator of what people can already do with the information they obtain from government, and ensure that these existing rights are maintained. This almost automatically leads to a very open data policy.

This exercise will be one for the Member States, without much assistance from the European Commission, as the Commission has repeatedly indicated that it has no competence to act on freedom of information issues. From a European Union perspective, this is a shame, as the harmonization intended by the PSI directive may be set back again. However, there are other guidelines and legislations to take inspiration from, such as the OECD Recommendation for Enhanced Access and More Effective Use of Public Sector Information and the Council of Europe Convention on Access to Official Documents. Based on these, the Member States should start thinking about developing information policies, going beyond occasional good practices, based on open data for any purpose.

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Last week I participated in the third (and sadly final!) conference of Communia project, a European thematic network on the digital public domain. The theme of this conference was University and Cyberspace and several of the talks articulated a vision in which universities, academics, and students play a key role in creating, curating and promoting the digital commons.

The panel that I took part in gave an overview of some of the key activities that the Communia project has undertaken — including work that we have been doing on the public domain calculators, which aim to help users find and identify works which are in the public domain in their jurisdiction.

I spoke briefly about the relation between the public domain and open government data — giving a brief introduction to the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of open government data and an overview of some of the many developments since our workshop on reusing public sector content and data in March 2009.

I concluded with two main ‘take-home’ points about open government data, public sector information and the digital public domain in Europe:

1. Broaden the scope of the PSI Directive. The directive does not currently include publicly funded cultural heritage organisations — such as museums or galleries — within its scope. The directive could be broadened to include these kinds of organisations, which might encourage them to open up their content and data for others to reuse. Opening up metadata about works and objects held by publicly funded cultural heritage organisations could be very useful to (i) help establish what is in the public domain in a given jurisdiction (as per the work on the calculators) and (ii) help to bootstrap a new generation of digital services for researchers and for the general public.

2. Broaden the evidence base for opening up PSI. At present the European Commission primarily focuses on the value of PSI in a fairly narrow sense — e.g. citing the MEPSIR and PIRA study estimates of a market size of 27 or 68 billion Euros (respectively). While this kind of evidence is obviously crucial for European policymakers, the Commission should also take into account other potential benefits of opening up PSI, such as improvements to public service delivery, greater accountability of public bodies, the intrinsic value of PSI (e.g. cultural or educational), and enabling the creation of new digital services for citizens. Value is not only about money!

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It’s April, and in the UK the sun has, at last, been sighted! To add to the cheer, The Open Knowledge Foundation’s 5th Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) takes place in ten days time on Saturday 24th April in London.

Tickets for OKCon 2010 are selling rapidly, so for those who’d like to ensure their place should register now:

http://www.okfn.org/okcon/register/

The event will see a whole host of individuals descend on London for a full day of sessions and workshops spanning the Open Knowledge spectrum including:

• State of the Nation Keynotes
  • Matthias Schindler, Wikimedia (Germany) on Bibliographic Data and the Public Domain
  • Glyn Moody, on the Post-Analogue World
  • Peter Murray-Rust, on Recent Developments in Open Science
  • Chris Taggart, on Open Local Government Data
  • Sören Auer, on Linked Open Data
  • Jordan Hatcher, on Open Licensing for Data
• Ideas and Culture with talks on analyzing Dickens Letters and Making the Physical from the Digital
• Open Bibliographic Information with talks on the Itinerant Poetry Library and the Journal Commons
• Community Driven Research with talks on Climate data and Open Archaeology
• Civic Information with talks on Using Open Government Data to Profile Politicians and the Straight Choice
• Open Government Data and PSI in the EU which looks at the current state of play in France, Norway, Germany, the UK and elsewhere
• Tools with talks on Large-scale data handling and revisioning with the Genome, Ontowiki, CKAN and more
• Open Data and the Semantic Web with talks about South Korean DBPedia and Thesaurus Management Tool ‘Pool Party’

We’re also delighted to have a wide variety of short and lightning talks:

http://wiki.okfn.org/okcon/2010/lightning

And we’ve still got space for more, so if you’re interested in a giving a lightning talk sign up on that wiki page.

Full Programme information for OKCon 2010 is available at:

http://www.okfn.org/okcon/programme

More information:

• Home page: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/
• FAQ: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/faq
• Registration: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/register/

We look forward to seeing people in a sunny London in April and making OKCon 2010 an event to remember!

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Subsequent to the recent consultation on Ordnance Survey data and Gordon Brown’s commitment to opening up (an unspecified amount of) the data in a speech last week - today the UK’s mapping agency is releasing a significant portion of their data for free use by the public.

More information is available in the following report, published yesterday by Communities and Local Government:

• http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/corporate/ordnancesurveyconresponse

The datasets which have been opened up include:

• OS Street View
• 1: 50 000 Gazetteer
• 1: 250 000 Colour Raster
• OS Locator
• Boundary-Line
• Code-Point Open
• Meridian 2
• Strategi
• MiniScale
• OS VectorMap District (available in May 2010)
• Land-Form PANORAMA

We’re glad to see that it looks like the data will be available under an open license:

this licence will allow the data to be used and re-used for free by the public, including for commercial use. (p. 17)

The official link to the data on their website has been overwhelmed all morning (which surely says something about public demand!). Some downloads are available from mySociety at:

• http://parlvid.mysociety.org:81/os/

Big kudos to the folk at Ernest Marples, who did a great job in encouraging people to respond to the consultation and facilitated nearly a third of submissions through their online tool.

More information is available at:

• The Guardian
• BBC News
• The Register
• Tech Radar

This is excellent news - and we very much look forward to learning more about the details as they unfold. We sincerely hope (given the date) that its not an elaborate joke!

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The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo, founded in 2006 is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data.

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a not-for-profit organization founded in 2004 and dedicated to promoting open knowledge in all its forms.

What follows is a shared response to some of the questions raised by the consultation on the future of the Ordnance Survey’s data licensing and pricing model. This was sent using Ernest Marples’ open UK Geographic Data Consultation response service. See also the Simply Understand digestable, short version of the consultation document. March 17th, this Wednesday is the closing day of the response period.

Geographic information is critical to making effective use of open government data. Everything happens somewhere; to find data, and analyse it, location is invaluable context.

The Making Public Data Public programme is part of a global trend among administrations to provide state-collected information to citizens, free of cost or constraints.

Read the rest of this entry »

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The following guest post is from Olav Anders Øvrebø, Assistant Professor at the University of Bergen, who recently worked on a report on open government data in Norway.

A loose community is forming, slowly pushing open data higher on the agenda of Norway’s politicians and civil servants. But these developers, journalists, academics, and IT business people have so far not achieved a significant breakthrough. Government pledges for opening up more data sources are still vague and non-binding.

The past few months I have led a fact-finding project about open data in Norway at the University of Bergen’s Department of Information Science and Media Studies. In the first phase of the project, we interviewed and surveyed civil servants at the state, regional and local government levels about their opinions on and interest in making datasets available for re-use. Our first project report (see English summary), presented at a seminar in Bergen in January, is mainly based on this work. Among the findings:

• Information scarcity: Banal, but true - to re-use data you first have to know that they exist. This is a very real hurdle. Few state agencies inform well about data sources on their websites, our research showed. Some have data catalogues where you can download datasets, a couple of them even sport APIs. But the majority offer insufficient, if any information. Clearly, a push is needed here, and one obvious tool would be a Norwegian data.gov. To spark some interest in this, we started to list datasets on an open Google spreadsheet. To date, some 130 datasets have been entered there. We have also suggested that informing about data sources - and making them available - should be added as criterions in a yearly evaluation of quality of public sector websites in Norway. This is a well-publicized event with prestigious awards; hence this could be an effective initative in raising awareness about open data.
• Great potential: In our survey among state agencies, two thirds said that their agency possesses data with potential for re-use that is not utilized today. Open data is on the agenda in many agencies; more than six out of ten said they plan to make more data available for re-use during the coming year. Our research generally indicates that knowledge and interest in opening up data varies widely across agencies and even in different departments of the same agency. In some local agencies, the interviewees had barely heard about publicizing data for re-use, whereas others have worked on making data available for years already.

In theory, the Scandinavian countries are potential open data champions. There is a long and well-established tradition of transparency in government, backed by far-reaching freedom of information legislation. In Norway, the legislation was recently amended to include a paragraph on database information (an adjustment prompted by the EU’s PSI directive). Other legislation, notably on the right to access to environmental information, provide additional tools for open data advocates, journalists and others who want access to public sector data.

In practice, however, open data remains a quite obscure question in the public sphere. The political attention generated by open data debates is nowhere near the levels seen in the US and UK. There are some signs of change, though. Recently, the Ministry of Government Administration has indicated that it will soon launch an Apps for Democracy-like competition. The success of some open data iniatitives such as weather data from the Meteorological Institute and (on a smaller scale) of airline traffic data from the state airport company Avinor, has stirred some interest among state agencies.

On the “demand” side, I think it’s fair to say that the legal tools I mentioned are not very well known and little used when it comes to forcing access to data sources. In contrast, claiming access to text documents is routine among Norwegian journalists, so also in this area the potential is there.

At our university department, we plan to continue our project with a different approach - building applications or services, hopefully in cooperation with Norwegian media. This way, we want to demonstrate how government data can be re-used in ways that stimulate public debate. We also have an ambition to strengthen the development of computational journalism. If we succeed in this, we can give a small contribution to what must be a long term goal for the open data community - moving from raw data to real insight.

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We recently attended a workshop in Luxembourg as part of Communia, the EU policy network on the digital public domain. There was a focus on bringing together themes from previous events to make a series of policy recommendations to the European Commission (watch this space!).

Below are a few notes highlighting some of the talks and discussions that we thought might be of particular interest to readers here:

• We had a meeting to review where we are up to with the Public Domain Calculators. So far it looks like we have 10 EU countries covered, 8 maybe covered and 6 that we are still looking for help with (namely: Cyprus, Denmark, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Slovenia). If you’d like to help out - please drop us a line!
• Jill Cousins from the European Digital Library Foundation spoke about the latest state of play with respect to licensing the content of Europeana, a collection of over 6 million images, texts, sound recordings and videos. In particular she spoke about the possibility of libraries and cultural heritage organisations releasing digital content into the public domain or under an open license. There has been some opposition - but we very much hope that institutions contributing to Europeana have the foresight to give this serious consideration!
• Paul Keller and Lucie Guibault presented their work on the recently released public domain manifesto - discussing the rationale behind it, its genesis and various versions, and an overview of its main principles and recommendations. At the time of writing it has been signed by over 50 organisations and 1800 individuals.
• Francesco Fusaro of the European Commission DG Research spoke about the EU initiatives to support open access to scientific publications and data - from background research in this area to piloting open access to approximately 20% of FP7 funded projects.
• Patrick Peiffer gave an excellent presentation on licensing options for bibliographic metadata. In particular he suggested that non-commercial restrictions could cause substantial transaction costs and technical complications. On the other hand using an ‘attribution, sharealike’ type license that allowed commercial reuse which would cause no transaction costs, create a level playing field, allow interoperability with projects like Wikimedia and Wikimedia Commons, avoid exclusive deals and open up new channels of discovery. It would be a big step if Europeana libraries and institutions follow the lead of CERN Library, who last week announced that they were opening up their metadata!
• Mathias Schindler spoke about tools developed by the Wikipedians using open bibliographic metadata. He also described what the Wikipedia community had done to add value to collections of cultural works - such as improving the quality of metadata, adding descriptions to images and so on.
• Rufus Pollock spoke about his work at the University of Cambridge to estimate the size and value of the public domain in Europe.

See also:

• Some photos on Flickr

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The following guest post is from Regards Citoyens, a French association of citizens with a shared interest in opening up information about the functioning of democratic institutions in France.

France is lagging behind…

There is no doubt about it: compared to other countries, France is definitely late in opening up its data. For a country so proud of its human rights and democratic revolution, it took a while before it finally joined the open data movement! The first “Open Data Camp” organized in Paris last December is a good example of this new momentum.

While the US and the UK have taken enormous steps in the past two years with the release of data.gov and data.gov.uk, France and many other southern European countries are still being very conservative about making public data public. To catch up in the world of open data will require more than just a few political measures. French institutions need a drastic change to their approach to the production and dissemination of official data. But nothing will be possible without support, demand and engagement from groups of citizens.

Interesting — and often relatively little known — projects already lead the way. For example, the HAL Archives opens up access to scientific journal articles and IREP offers access to data about pollutants. But this is just a very small fraction of material that is out there. The vast majority of official documents, datasets and publicly funded research remains inaccessible to citizens. Indeed, it can be very difficult for an individual to gain access to specific public documents. In 1978, a committee called CADA was created to provide advice on such demands, but such public services often won’t process the requests easily.

For historical reasons, it is especially difficult to change French officials’ approach to data release. For a very long time, most public data sharing has been done by public administrations classified as EPIC (Etablissement Public à caractère Industriel et Commercial or Public Administration for Industrial and Commercial purposes). These administrations have a prior commercial purpose even though their data are considered public. Examples include key providers of meteorological data and geospatial data. Having both public and commercial purposes, such administrations tend to be interested in making profit from the data by selling it to corporate businesses. Therefore, it can be a real challenge for citizens to get free access to these data and reuse them for civil society projects to strengthen democracy, to increase citizen engagement or to improve the delivery of public services.

The former DJO (Direction des Journaux Officiels or Directorate of Official Publications), now called DILA (Direction de l’Information Légale et Administrative, Directorate of Legal and Administrative Information), is another good example of this situation. This administration is in charge of all legal data including laws issued by the parliament and official government decisions. Before 2002, online access to the French legislation was restricted through a régime de concession à titre onéreux. This means only those able and willing to pay a license, mainly companies like Reuters or Lamy, were allowed to utilise the documents. The situation changed in 2002 and now any individual has access to these key legal documents thanks to LégiFrance. Extra features like an access to the rich XML feed of any legislation modification could be of great help to improve legislative monitoring projects like Regards Citoyens’ Simplify the law. Unfortunately these features are still restricted to users able to pay the fee.

Government initiatives: limited access but not openness

Despite all of this, the global movement for openness has recently taken a radical turn thanks to the data.gov projects, the 2007 EU INSPIRE Directive (planned to be transposed in France in June 2010) and Sweden’s initiative to promote eGovernment projects during its presidency of Europe. All of these seem to have triggered some change within French government’s view of public data and some things have started to change.

A new administration, the DILA, was recently created to replace the DJO and try to impulse an improved production and diffusion of public data. In this context, a new agency called APIE (Agence du Patrimoine Immatériel de l’Etat, the State’s Intangible Heritage Agency) was settled to lead the reflexion, coordinate, estimate and organize a common data effort between the different administrations. The objective is to propose by the middle of 2010 a platform that will promote all different sources of data and describe their respective licenses.

Unfortunately, the French government’s historical lack of openness left an open field to the private sector. Some companies largely benefit of this situation: they make profit out of the data by becoming an intermediate between the administration and data users. A good example of this is the GFII (the Groupement Français de l’Industrie de l’Information, or French Association of Electronic Information Industry). Disappointed in having such difficult contact with the government, this active lobbying group started to take care individually of civil servants’ training, and progressively became the official investor and organizer of training programmes instead of the government. This entry of the private sector into matters of public administration certainly contributed to the APIE’s information licensing decisions: there is an obvious inclination to sell the data to companies without considering the benefits of allowing reuse by citizen driven projects using open licences. This situation is neither good for innovation nor for the production of common knowledge.

Citizen driven open data initiatives in France

Like in many countries, the first steps into open data came from the research and the Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) communities. WikiMedia France and OpenStreetMap.fr are probably the most popular open knowledge projects in France. Early websites like Mon-Depute.fr — a vote monitoring project created by an archivist — or droit.org — a very active project from l’Ecole des Mines on legal publication — helped a lot to make democratic data available. Our work at Regards Citoyens on parliamentary activity with NosDéputés.fr and on electoral data is a new step for French open data for democracy and civil society.

OpenStreetMap.fr is a very good example of a citizen driven open data project. The Public Land Registry (Cadastre) has a website intended to publish their map, which provides interesting information but not openly. Therefore, some contributors of OpenStreetMap found out how to technically access the raw data. But this still was not enough to open up the data for anyone. So the OSM community studied the legal situation and contacted the French Ministry of Finance in charge of this service. They finally got an answer in January 2009: a global export of their whole database is not allowed, but a partial one is. So hundreds of volunteers began a crowdsourcing effort and OpenStreetMap.fr is now able to free more and more data from the Land Registry.

All of these are good examples that open data is not only about technology: it also often depends on the efforts of a community in order to legally secure the data and encourage others to allow it to be reused for any purpose. That is why we helped organise the first French Open Data Camp in Paris, where more than 120 people came to learn and share their skills. We learned a lot about information visualisation techniques from existing projects and from interesting theoretical ones! We also had a good conversation with activists, ‘hacktivists’, and others about the political, economic and administrative benefits of open data.

The success of this event seems like a pretty good demonstration that France is ready and already made its first steps into the global world of open data. Regards Citoyens will follow these changes and will try to modestly contribute to the global open data movement by working together with international organisations such as the Open Knowledge Foundation. With our fellow “campers”, we are convinced that making public data accessible and reusable will bring great benefits to commercial innovation, democratic organisations, and to civil society.

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