[euopendata] A plan to liberate data from the EU organisations?

Sat Feb 13 12:12:02 UTC 2010

Hi!

As I understand, the EU bureaucracy itself is not affected by the PSI
directive (it is only applicable for member states). It is likely that
the EU organisations maintain a large number of valuable datasets that
could increase transparency and improve efficiency.

My own experience with getting access to raw data from the
Publications Office of the European Union was not a pleasant one. When
I was building the eurlex.nu website I wanted the raw XML for the
various legal documents (e.g. directives), but was told it would cost
me around 10000 EUR to get them. Also, it was not clear how a citizen
could question that practice.

How do we organize our efforts to create a pressure for the EU orgs
themselves to release data? A suggestion:

1. List all datasets from EU orgs that we know of (available online or not)
2. Show how few of them are openly available
3. Create a petition to urge EU decision makers to adopt the spirit of
the PSI directive for the EU bureaucracy itself.

Regards,

Peter

[1]: http://publications.europa.eu/