Danish government Open Data initiative has uncertain future.

The Danish government Open Data initiative ODIS (Offentlige Data i Spil, bringing public data into play) faces an uncertain future, as tweeted by Cathrine Lippert, the ODIS project leader.

The ODIS project started early 2009, as part of the ITST (IT and telecom agency) of the Ministry of Science, and since then is a main driving force behind open government data enthusiasm in Denmark. Using a largely bottom-up approach, but well embedded in regular policy processes, thus far resulted in a national open data competition (2009/2010), various coding days to showcase the potential of data, and experiments like having a group of 'data hunters'.

The current organisational structure is being torn down it appears, and both people and projects will be redistributed to other ministries. At this point it is unclear which ministries this might be, and whether it will mean the end of ODIS or not.

What might be taken as a hopeful sign is that only recently the Danish Minister for Science indicated PSI re-use will be a priority in the 2012 Danish EU presidency. Particularly as the review of the PSI Directive is also underway.

You can follow the ODIS group in the Danish digitaliser.dk platform to keep track of further developments.