London: 14 November 2008

The Unlocking the Potential of Public Sector Information conference that took place on the 14 October 2008 in central London included three Policy Workshops, a report back session followed by a question and answer session. The three workshops were:

• PSI: Opportunity or Threat?
• PSI: Regulation and Resolution
• Freeing up information, benefiting local communities

The key points from the workshop reports were:

1. PSI: Opportunity or Threat?

Opportunities

• An open market for everyone
• Maximise creativity

Threats

• Misuse and misrepresentation
• The confusion over what is raw data and what is added value data
• The impact upon the Public Sector information Holder

2. PSI: Regulation and Resolution

• The need for greater transparency on how sanctions are applied
• Keep it simple and flexible
• More clarification needed in the PSI Regulations for example third party data
• Pilot licensing
• More involvement with re-users for example the Third sector

3. Freeing up information, benefiting local communities

• The value of information to the local communities
• The inconsistency across public bodies at the local level
• Records management and the need for greater investment of resources

Summary of the reactions to the reports included amongst others:

In response to the workshop reports it was felt that a huge marketing job was needed if the PSI agenda was to move forward. It was acknowledged that the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act in the UK did include an extensive awareness raising programme, that ran over a number of years at a cost in the region of £100 million, which also supported by actions within civil society (pressure groups, blogs, etc.) and the media. The UK Guardian Free Our Data Campaign has contributed to raising the awareness across the board from Ministers through to the UK citizens that read the Guardian newspaper. Case studies were seen as one part of the armoury to Change Public Sector Culture. Such initiatives were seen as supply push and this needed to be complemented by a demand pull and that the private sector re-users also had a role to play in educating the public sector information holders on the potential downstream uses of the data that they hold. This provoked a response that if public sector bodies will not even consider re-use then it was a waste of valuable private sector resources in trying to facility the demand pull approach.

The initiatives referred to in presentations prior to the workshops and later in the conference were also further good examples of how awareness and raising the level of understanding could be achieved in order to reap the benefits and opportunities from the re-use of public sector information. These initiatives included amongst others:

• The UK Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI): Public Sector Information Unlocking Service
• The UK Cabinet Office Power of Information Task Force (PoI): Show Us a Better Way
• The European Commission The DGT Multilingual Translation Memory

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