Amsterdam, 15 September 2011

(by Ton Zijlstra)

At the yearly PICNIC conference and festival the Dutch government announced two new steps towards opening more government held data for re-use, coinciding with the Day of Democracy.

The session in which the announcements were made was jointly organized by the Ministry for Internal Affairs and Kingdom Relations and the Ministry for Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation.

The major announcements were:

- the launch of the next release of the Dutch national government data portal, data.overheid.nl. This portal was already available in beta since January of this year, and now its functionality has been more thoroughly integrated with other government platforms, while also providing ways to provide feedback and showcasing examples.

- the launch of AppsvoorNederland, a nation wide app building competition. This competition is an initiative by the two mentioned Ministries and the Ministry for Education, Culture and Science.

The AppsvoorNederland (apps for the Netherlands) competition was launched by a high ranking official of the Ministry for Economic Affairs while the renewed national data portal was formally launched by the Minister for Interior Affairs Donner in a video message to the PICNIC conference participants. A video message that had the audience roaring with laughter because of the Minister's wittiness. Video and transcript are online (including a file with the English subtitles).

Saying that the launch of the open data portal is rather the beginning of a process than the end of it, Minister Donner committed himself to "together with my colleague of Economic Affairs make sure to implement a truly effective national open data policy, in which the open data portal will be the point of acces to all government information in a simple, fast and (sometimes nearly) free way."