Helsinki, 21 October 2010

Slush Helsinki is an annual event bringing together "entrepreneurs and their business ideas, seasoned experts, angel investors, VC’s and this year also the open data developers". The name comes from the snow slush in wintery Finland. "If you can survive the winter slush in Finland, you can do anything".

Antti Poikola hosted and moderated a panel at this event, as he explains in his blog posting.

The panel brought together:

• Atte Jääskeläinen, editor in chief of YLE news (the Finnish National Broadcasting Company), on the role of his company as both a data provider and a data re-user.
• Jyrki Kasvi, Member of Parliament for the Green Party, on the political perspective on open government data
• Ville Meloni, project manager at Forum Virium Helsinki on the Helsinki Region Infoshare project.
• Antti Pakarinen, of labs.kirjastot.fi, organizational perspective on opening government data (the Helsinki region library opened up their data)
• Karri Saarinen, partner at Kisko Labs, on the challenges a company faces to find and re-use public data.

This panel composition of the panel makes for an interesting mix of perspectives, resulting in the following video in English that's worth watching.