Announcing the ePSI Trailblazers 2012

In the run to the upcoming ePSI Conference 2012 on 16th March in Rotterdam, Netherlands, we are very excited to announce the ePSI Trailblazers 2012.

What are the ePSI Trailblazers?

What if, instead of handing out another award, we could offer you both recognition from your peers and help in improving your work? At the ePSI Conference, you’ll have the chance to present your ideas and get help in making these ideas even better!

The ePSIplatform is looking for PSI re-use innovators – the ‘trailblazers’ – who have done something new and exciting with open data in the past year. Similar to other open data competitions, criteria for selection would include:

Usefulness to the citizens, visitors and public sector
Potential for application to be useful for other governmental bodies,
including in other Member States
Appeal of the application from a usability perspective
Inventive and original nature of the application

Selected initiatives can include both well established applications and services, and new/start-up initiatives, proofs-of-concept and demos. Trailblazers will get the opportunity to give a five minute presentation at the EPSI conference to explain what they’ve done and why this is innovative.

However – and this is where trailblazers get more than a simple award – the winners would also be asked to explain in a few minutes what they need to move their initiative forward, and to do even better things with it. This can be as straightforward as getting new seed funding, but may also involve more pragmatic things: help in liaising with other governments, finding new programmers/hackers to help build technical improvements, organizing brainstorming sessions to identify new application areas, identifying new relevant data sets, getting legal assistance, etc. The EPSI team will then try to help them achieve this objective by providing funding or material assistance.

This innovative approach will have a much more pragmatic impact on the recipients: they can present their needs, and we will try to help them in building better services.