The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation.
Several key open data organisations in France – including Regards Citoyens, Creative Commons France and Veni Vidi Libri – have clubbed together to draft a Declaration on Open Data in France:
- The declaration emphasises the importance of a legal and licensing strategy which means that French public datasets are made freely available for re-use for any purpose (as per OpenDefinition.org).
This comes at an important juncture, while the French Government is still busy working out the legal and technical details for the new data.gouv.fr initiative.
A recent speech from Séverin Naudet (of data.gouv.fr) at the European Digital Agenda Assembly last week gave strong, explicit support for minimising restrictions and maximising the reusability of French public datasets, recognising the wide variety of social and economic benefits that fully open data can deliver.
But there is no doubt plenty more work to be done to convince key stakeholders both inside and outside the French government. We hope the new declaration will feed into the process of figuring out a legal strategy for opening up France’s data!
If you’re interested in open government data in France, you can join our ogd-fr mailing list.
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
