Utrecht, 25 August 2011

(by Ton Zijlstra)

Five Dutch cities with active open data programs or projects met up today. The cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, Eindhoven, and Enschede, as well as the national ICT Office (ICTU) and the Ministry for Interior Affairs, together responsible for the Dutch national data portal, were represented. The meeting was organized by Ton Zijlstra and hosted by the City of Utrecht.

What sets these cities apart is not just having active open data programs, but also that real interaction between civil servants and citizens on the process of opening up data and finding things to do with data is taking place. The presence of such an 'ecosystem' is very important to be able to move forward and get results.

With increased local attention to opening up government held data for the public, local public sector bodies are also very likely to encounter similar issues and questions to solve. The exchange of experiences and discussion of plans makes it easier to speed the process up. At the same time it allows for running various experiments with possible solutions to issues in parallel, thus picking the more successful ones. This was the reason to bring these Dutch cities together.

The five cities involved together already bring a lot of experience to the table. To name just a few things: two have run app competitions, several opened up data on their websites, two organized a conference, one created an internal platform allowing back office systems to publish to the web safely in various machine readable formats, one created a data store, two involved students in app building projects, and two adopted motions in the city council calling for active open data provision. And all these activities are taking place with active involvement of citizens and organizations in the city.

This first meeting was focussed on getting to know each other and hearing what each of the cities has already been working on, and what challenges are perceived.

It was decided that a next meeting will take place in 2 month times, where specific questions will be discussed and experiments may be formulated. Several small steps and actions were also agreed, meant to learn by doing.