Potsdam report

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Posted by ChrisCorbin on 09 Jun 2007

Potsdam: 4th and 5th June 2007

The International Symposium titled PSI on the private market took place in Potsdam on the 4th & 5th of June 2007. Gerhard Wagner ePSI plus Analyst was present at the meeting and has provided the following brief report.

Proposed Recommendations

The meeting and the presenters proposed the following recommendations to the European Commission

Recommendation 1

In exceptional cases public data holders that receive a PSI request for the first time - so called PSI beginners; shall be granted a grace period if they agree to hire an external PSI mediator (or national PSI competence centre). The 20 day period to answer a PSI request might be extended to 40 days or even longer. The only purpose of this grace period is – by means of the mediator; to undertake a proper cost calculation and to prepare all technical and legal requirements to license the public data in a positive form.

Recommendation 2

Governments are encouraged to establish a national PSI competence centre, preferably in the form of PPP involving both expertise and funding from the public and private sphere.

Recommendation 3

Pricing: A one year trial period would help public data holders to evaluate the demand and to calculate prices: within this year all PSI is licensed for free and based on the resulting demand future prices are calculated – by the help of a PSI competence centre. Dr. Hecker, Geokomm proposed this recommendation.

Symposium report

The State Commissioner for Data Protection hosted the event. Within Germany the German data protection authorities have responsibility for FOI and PSI legislation implementation.
This symposium was indeed one of the most challenging one in the last years in Europe. Speakers and participants came from the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Slovenia, Cyprus, Latvia, Spain, The Netherlands, Czech Republic and Austria. The symposium covered a wide variety of aspects including mechanisms of the function of PSI re-use markets.
The symposium did – for the first time in Europe – investigate the level playing field of PSI re-use in the U.S. at the state and county level. The keynote speaker from Colorado explained that they still keep public copyright, but handled it very simply - without restrictions. Whenever a private requester submits a request the public bodies apply only general FOI criteria and no details of the future service of the re-user are sought. One interesting aspect was that the public data holders monitor the creative re-use service and are eager to re-license them when they serve their internal needs. This keeps the information flowing round the world and drives the PSI-cycle.
Mrs Tullo, Director of OPSI (UK) gave a very concise overview on the change of re-use policy in the UK from 1997 on when she pushed the liberal regime of re-use which was strengthened again in 2001. Although her office lost a substantial amount of its revenues by waiving copyright on several types of PSI, e.g. legal information; she would never return to the past model. The macro-economic benefits for both the public and private sector are substantial and led to a bulk of innovative private added value services. In addition, annual reports track the market development and provide input to political decision makers.
Mr Püschel from the German Government outlined the implementation of the PSI Directive and the various disputes that have arisen from a partial overlap between the FOI and PSI legislation. The FOI legislation came into force in Germany on the 1st January 2006. This was followed by the PSI Act in December 2006. Mr Püschel made the observation that the PSI Act is even narrowing the liberal PSI provisions of Laender FOI legislation. In the case of non-public PSI, an FOI request must be followed by a PSI request, resulting in the PSI requester being charged twice.
From the background of this very tricky and confusing implementation in Germany, Mr Wagner (private opinion) disagreed with the common legal theory that FOI and PSI legislation form two sides of a coin and that FOI legislation acts as enabler to PSI legislation. Mr Wagners two-market theory is based on the U.S. philosophy that PSI leaving the public sector (first market) is freed from all previous imposed legal or constitutional obligations.
Wagner an ePSIplus Analyst also presented the interim results of the EU project ePSIplus pointing out that in terms of pricing or public culture no simple models can be proposed in order to create new jobs and new innovative products. He invited the delegates to register for the free ePSIplus newsletter and to attend one of the workshops scheduled over the coming months.
PRICING: Mr Hecker (Geokom) highlighted the Austrian success story of the Land Survey Agency (BEV) where a 90 percent decrease of re-use prices was outbalanced by a 90 percent increase in demand. Following this model and in order to test the price elasticity, he proposed to start a one year trial period where PSI is licensed for free so that the public data holders could easily observe whether the re-use market emerges and to what extent.
Due to the absence of the Estonian speaker Mr Wagner presented the Austrian PSI-navigator, which will be used in the future also for FOI purposes. Furthermore the European PSI-navigator established in the past years (funded by the European Commission) still lacks efficient marketing efforts and as a result European-wide deployment is unlikely to occur.
Mr Wagner also outlined three recent PSI-cases in Slovenia and Austria where re-use was not granted due to data protection reservations.
The proposal of Wagner to establish a German competence centre on PSI re-use was warmly appreciated since a similar centre’s are operating successfully in the UK and Germany.
The conference was closed with a roundtable of private IT companies and the business associations GEOKOMM and D21/ESG moderated in a very inspiring form by Dr. Klumpp, the host of the conference (Alcatel-Lucent Foundation). The IT-industry showed readiness to supply methodologies and technologies to measure demand for re-use, target groups and to identify the “optimum prize” for PSI re-use.