We are witnessing recently a positive political engagement and willingness to make government information more widely available and reusable in Europe. These are really good news. The UK's announcement to follow the USA www.data.gov initiative[1] was a first important milestone. Engaging Tim Berners-Lee for the job was an excellent choice. The Visby and Malmö Ministerial Declarations are important messages for the further development of the EU PSI policy agenda. They both recognise the economic potential of PSI re-use and call on the MS "to make data freely accessible in open machine-readable formats, for the benefit of entrepreneurship, research and transparency"[2].

"The demand side", reusers and other citizens, are also making their views known. In the Open Declaration on Public Services 2.0, a bottom up initiative of well known supporters of PSI reuse, such as Tom Steinberg or Alberto Ortiz de Zárate, they propose that public sector organisations provide information in open, standard and reusable formats, in ways that others can easily build on them. These messages add to the work of the PSI Alliance.

All these latest developments recognise PSI re-use as an important strand of the digital agenda. The task is now to concretise these high-level declarations into concrete actions and results, in every Member State, in all public sector bodies. Let's work hard for it. Last Friday Mme Kroes was appointed Commissioner designate for the Digital Agenda. Be sure that I will feed her with many ideas for supporting our work. We have a good opportunity ahead, but we will only succeed with the joint effort of all stakeholders. I count on your support.

[1] The UK's Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has invited Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a British engineer and computer scientist and MIT professor credited with inventing the World Wide Web, to work with the UK Government to help them make data more accessible on the Web, building on the work of the Power of Information Task Force. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/10/berners-lee-downing-street-web-open

[2] Creating impact for an eUnion 2015 – "The Visby Declaration"