Copenhagen, 15 June 2011,

(by Ton Zijlstra)

Cathrine Lippert (@cathrinelippert), who heads the ODIS (the national Danish open data initiative) at the Danish public body ITST, is our new guest blogger. In her posting "Data Hunters and Data Publishing on a Shoestring" she shares the experiences she and her colleagues made in the past years bringing re-use and open data forward in Denmark.

Data Hunters

ITST has created a group of Data Hunters that help the public in finding data sets, as well as go out looking on their own. They also made an inventory of all publishable data from their own Ministery. Some findings:

• "For the Danish Ministry of Science, non-publishable datasets constituted only approximately 5% of the total number of datasets." (non-publishable due to personal data, classified data or data subject to third party rights.)
• "Opening up our data was a lot easier, a lot quicker and much cheaper than anticipated, but we’re all quite convinced that we could easily have made it difficult, slow and costly if we’d approached it differently."
• "We believe we need a very agile approach and a lot of collaboration (bordering on co-creation) with all stakeholders. We simply don’t have the time to work it all out before we act - or the money to create near-perfect solutions the way most public bodies prefer."

Go read it all in our blog!

Guest blogging: change in procedure, and you're invited!

Until now at this platform you've been used to seeing a guest blogger write several postings over the course of a month or two, before a new guest blogger took over. We will however from now on be looking for more diverse input, and publishing singular guest blog postings by guest authors. We will be aiming for a pool of guest bloggers who contribute postings when they feel it is useful and fun to do. Next to the first great contribution by Cathrine Lippert, we have three other authors lined up, who you'll be seeing postings from soon.

Are you interested in guest blogging at the epsiplatform.eu? Do let us know on info@epsiplatform! We are looking forward to hear from you!