[epsi-coord] Trailblazers

Sat Feb 18 11:24:53 GMT 2012

Hi all,

my first thoughts on the Trailblazers, updates here: http://de.okfnpad.org/Trailblazers

# CATEGORIES

Democracy
- Transparency & Accountability & Anti-Corruption
- Citizens participation
- 

Every Days Use
- Finders
- Transport
- 

DATA JOURNALISM
- 
- 
- 

# CANDIDATES

http://sejmometr.pl/ 

http://www.fixmytransport.com/

http://www.opentraintimes.com/

http://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/

http://www.mapnificent.net/

http://znasichdani.sk/l?l=en

http://opencorporates.com/

http://whoslobbying.com/

http://www.asktheeu.org/

For reference the concept note by Hans.

For our first major conference, we've tried to come up with a more
creative alternative to the awards proposal from our offer, as we've noted
a clear degree of 'award fatigue' and a growing indifference towards the
general concept in the PSI community. We wanted our alternative to retain
the element of public recognition that an award would aim to provide (to
ensure also that we still satisfy the terms of our offer), but also to
make it more concrete, valuable and useful to the recipients. As a result,
we came up with the concept of EPSI Trailblazers.

The basic idea is that we choose a number of PSI reuse innovators
('trailblazers'), who've done something new and exciting in the last year
or so. Similar to other open data competitions, criteria for selection
would include:

1. Usefulness to the citizens, visitors and public sector
2. Potential for application to be useful for other governmental bodies,
including in other Member States
3. Appeal of the application from a usability perspective
4. Inventive and original nature of the application

Selected initiatives can include both well established applications and
services, and new/start-up initiatives, proofs-of-concept and demos. These
Trailblazers would be asked to give a five minute presentation at the EPSI
conference to explain what they've done and why this is innovative.

However - and this is where the concept is different from a simple award -
they would also be asked to explain in a few minutes what they need to
move their initiative forward, and to do even better things with it. This
can be as straightforward as getting new seed funding, but may also
involve more pragmatic things: help in liaising with other governments,
finding new programmers/hackers to help build technical improvements,
organizing brainstorming sessions to identify new application areas,
identifying new relevant data sets, getting legal assistance, etc. The
EPSI team would then try to help them achieve this objective by providing
funding or material assistance (e.g. through the 'Ask an Expert'-service).
The goal would thus not be to just hand out another award, but to actually
help the recipients.

We feel that this would be an innovative approach that would meet the
requirements of the offer (providing recognition through the EPSI
trailblazer label), but that would also have a much more pragmatic impact
on the recipients: they can present their needs, and we can try to help
them in building better services. Obviously, it has the clear additional
benefit of being a good promotion of the positive impact of the EPSI
platform and the EU's PSI initiatives in general, and would help us
highlight the platform and its services further.

--

Daniel Dietrich
Editor of the ePSI platform
Chairman and Project Manager OKF DE

Open Knowledge Foundation
Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age
www.okfn.org - www.okfn.de

www.ddie.me
twitter.com/ddie
+49 176 327 685 30