Three weeks ago I and my colleague Frank Verschoor took about 30 civil servants from 10 countries through a workshop (in Warsaw) on seeing Open Data as a policy instrument that has value to the public sector itself.

A lot of the discussion on the potential of open data focuses on the economic potential, and the impact on transparency. Important things, but the benefits of it don’t accrue at the public sector body (PSB) that opens up the data. To make sure that a PSB keeps routinely publishing open data, having a direct benefit for the PSB itself is a great motivator.

Open data can be a policy instrument to help reach policy goals. At different levels of maturity examples are available, starting at improving (internal) efficiency by reducing transaction costs, through seeing how third party usage impacts own policy goals, and stimulating that usage, to the emergence of new services created by citizens/organisations and public sector bodies collaboratively that would not be possible otherwise.

In the workshop we explored where the participants were now on that spectrum, and how to start the path to the next level of maturity.

Below you find the slides to my introductory remarks, the workshop output, and a video impression made by Elmine.

20130221 ePSI Workshop Warsaw the Results by The Green Land

On 22 February we as the ePSIplatform team organized a big conference in Warsaw on Open Government Data. With 300 people registered from 30 countries, and 40 speakers, it was almost as big as last year’s conference we organized in Rotterdam.

As this was our last big event under the ePSIplatform contract, which ended 1 March, we decided to use the Opening Keynote to provide an overview of what was achieved in the past few years in Open Data, and especially what is still to be done, and the challenges and pitfalls connected to that. I will provide a full transcript later, but below you find the slides and the video (first 20 minutes) of the presentation.

The State of European Open Data, by Ton Zijlstra