London: 24 April 2010

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) annual conference – OKCon2010 took place at the University College of London (UCL) on Saturday 24th April 2010. The Conference was well attended but a number of speakers and delegates from across the world were unable to attend due to the aftermath of the Icelandic volcanic ash impact on air transport. It was also evident that the impact of the UK general election public sector purdah policy had reduced the number of UK public sector employees present at the conference.

The European Public Sector Information Platform team was present at OKCon2010 and participated in the conference session titled: Open Government Data and PSI in the EU. The session included two pan European perspectives and two Member State perspectives – Norway and France. The session attracted 25 participants that had a keen interest in opening up public sector information for re-use for the benefit of ALL in society.

The question and answer session following the short presentations considered the following topics amongst others:

• the need for case studies that demonstrate the benefits arising from opening up public sector information for subsequent re-use.
• the focus by many Member States on E-government rather than the data.
• the difficulties a public sector employee has when handling Access requests and Re-use requests – the interaction of the implementation of the access laws (Freedom of Information), the PSI re-use laws and the privacy laws.
• the difficulties in balancing the privacy aspects when opening up public sector information – the example of public sector procurement was cited.
• the need to rank data.gov services not just by there presence but by the amount of data that they gave access to.
• the role of civil society in raising the awareness and demonstrating to the public sector how to open up their information holdings and the value that arises from that.
• the possible reasons as to why at the current time data.gov services had been mainly implemented in English language speaking countries.
• the possible reasons as to why European Member States have shown little interest in opening up public sector information.
• the Slovenian Information Commissioners approach to handling issues related to financial charges for Slovenian PSI - where if the PSI re-use requester was not re-using the PSI for commercial gain then the financial charge should be waived. This developed into a discussion on what was "commercial gain". This led to the example of an NGO that was not commercial but to cover their costs charged a nominal fee for the publications that they may have produced that included the PSI. Other examples discussed included journalists undertaking scrutiny but publishing in a news paper sold on the open market; lawyers representing their clients in Court where the Barristers and Lawyers were clearly providing their services commercially. The discussion concluded that No financial charge or only the financial charge of delivering the PSI was the simplest solution that over came such issues that currently exist when re-using PSI.
• the role of the Freedom of Information activist community when combined with the PSI re-use activists within civil society could help apply greater pressure on the Public Sector to comply with the spirit of the PSI re-use Directive. Bulgaria was cited as an example during the transposition phase of the EU Directive 2003/98/EC
• the potential reasons as to why the implementation of the PSI Re-use Directive in Germany was so weak or almost non existent!
• the plans and aspirations to implement a data.gov service in Sweden.
• the interaction of crowd sourced substitute data such as OpenStreetMap with the re-use of public sector information provided a number of good case studies as the OpenStreetMap was providing the geographic base to present PSI obtained via the PSI reuse framework.

The OKC2010 also included a number of presentations that referred to public sector information and the increasing interest and delivery of data.gov services around the world as well as the challenges faced when opening up public sector information on a large scale.

Related news topics

OKCon2010: Programme published