Visby: 11 November 2009

The Information Society Conference “Visby Agenda – Creating Impact for an eUnion 2015", held in Visby, Sweden, on 9-10 November 2009, was arranged by the Swedish EU Presidency with the participation of the European Commission, the Member States of the EU, candidate and potential candidate countries as well as industry representatives and other relevant stakeholders.

The European Union is about to form a new ICT policy agenda replacing the current i2010 vision. The Visby Agenda Conference aimed to identify the most important Information Communication Technology (ICT) policy issues and questions for the period 2010-2015 and beyond.

The Visby Declaration

An important outcome of the Visby Agenda Conference was the adoption of the Presidency Conclusions – the (now online). Two of the recommendations refer specifically to making public data freely accessible and to the need for member states to improve access to PSI and that the domains includied in the EU PSI Re-use Directive be enlarged and are as follows.

• “Point 10 - EU member states and community institutions should seek to make data freely accessible in open machine-readable formats, for the benefit of entrepreneurship, research and transparency.
• Point 11 - Access to and reuse of public sector information and data should be improved among EU Member States. The domains of data targeted by the Directive on the re-use of public sector information should be enlarged.”

The Swedish Presidency Conference conclusions will be input to the Council Conclusions of the Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council (TTE) meeting in Brussels on 17-18 December 2009. The Visby Declaration is an important contribution to the Commission’s work on producing a new IT policy agenda for the EU.

Related Conference Materials

• Conference Programme
• Watch the conference and download speakers’ presentations
• The report, "A Green Knowledge Society - An ICT policy agenda to 2015 for Europe’s future knowledge society", was debated in various forums during the autumn and subsequently discussed from various perspectives at the Conference (executive summary) (full report)
• Presidency Conclusions ()

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