Opening up government data in France took a big step when Etalab launched the French national open government data portal in early December. On 19 December, Etalab's director Séverin Naudet took questions from an on-line audience, who wished to know more about the new French data portal, and its future development.

The answers to those questions have now been published on the Etalab website.

In his answers mr Naudet conveys the message that Etalab is seeing the launch of the data portal as the start of a path of improvement. Both in terms of data availability as well as in terms of the data formats (many data sets are not in open standards yet), and for instance in terms of access (providing API's) and documenting the data sets so that re-users can better understand their potential.

A future version of the data portal probably will also offer functionality to interact, as working together with the open data community is already important to Etalab. Mr. Naudet also commented on the cost until now of the project, which amounts to 900.000 Euro, saying this was comparable to the efforts made by the UK and US government.