Paris: 26 April 2010

Regards Citoyens (French Association of citizens with shared interest in opening up information about the functioning of democratic institutions in France) has posted a blog topic entitled: “Open Knowledge Conf 2010: une année prometteuse pour l’OpenData” or in “English: Open Knowledge Conf 2010: a promising year for Open Data”.

The post by Regards Citoyens captures the essence of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s fifth Conference (OKCon 2010) held in London on the 24th April 2010. The Conference attracted participants and speakers from throughout Europe resulting in stimulating presentations and enthusiastic discussions throughout the comprehensive Conference programme demonstrating the competence, enthusiasm and determination of the European Open Data community.

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The post commentary by Regards Citoyens (approximate English translation) (French Text online):

“On Saturday, April 24, just three years after the adoption of the INSPIRE directive, the Open Knowledge Foundation organized the OKCon 2010 Conference at the University of London: knowledge sharing, license-free content and promotion of OpenData were on the agenda of this 5th edition Conference.

The last 12 months have been very rich in Britain. From Parliament's new website and the powerful data.gov.uk, not to mention the very recent news about data from the Ordnance Survey, the political situation is very favorable to free data movement, and the leading candidates in the general election on May 6 pledged to continue the effort Brown initiated. On March 22, 2010, the Prime Minister and evoked an encouraging assessment of the effort by his administration:

'Rather than let the officials only authors and publishers [utilities], we will open the data and content for the community and draw their consideration of applications that can meet real needs. This does not require huge government IT infrastructure: technology free software that will do this is available free of charge [license]. The success of such an operation is based solely in the hands of the central government will agree to give up part of its control.

This bold new approach will transform the way services are delivered and, more importantly, will enable citizens to exercise control over the services essential to their lives and their communities.’

The unexpected release of UK postcodes accelerated citizen initiatives in this electoral context with such projects as TheStraightChoice or association between the Democracy Club and mySociety. The example is particularly illuminating YourNextMP: after scrapping the first of several sources (Wikipedia, party sites, ...) Edmund von der Burg has preferred to focus on the handiwork of a community of 6,000 volunteers to identify the 4000 candidates. Citizens can identify the national and local concerns of future elected politicians by submitting individual sets of specific issues queries.

The challenge for future elected officials will be to promote the release of local data to the image of the work done by Chris Taggart of OpenlyLocal, which lists local and mapping operations. Tracking spending all of them and perhaps their future integration into the project WhereDoesMyMoneyGo allow citizens to better understand and monitor the operation of public finances at both the local and national levels.

At European level, this conference was an opportunity to discover the impressive work of Ikkieswijzer.nl. Based on a multilingual parsing engine, researchers at the University of Amsterdam evaluate the work in the European Parliament: From simple queries on keywords or even entire texts (newspaper articles, ...), it identifies, by nationality or party, the Euro-deputies of the previous legislature had spoken on the subjects sought. An inspiring work and continuing!

Besides feedback on mapping, OpenData scientific or literary, semantic web or physical reproduction of digital data, this conference was an opportunity to glimpse the impact of European directives on PSI Re-use and NSPIRE legislation related to Norway and Belgium. The work done by the small team of EPSIPlaform is notable in this regard: they both identify institutional initiatives and those from civil society. Their catalog PSI is a source of information complementary to CKAN by the Open Knowledge Foundation. Hopefully this work will inspire the leaders of the Digital Agenda of the European Commission ….”

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