[euopendata] Two recommendations on opening up European PSI

[Jonathan Gray]

Two recommendations on opening up PSI in Europe from the Communia
conference (28-30th June):

1. Broaden the scope of the PSI Directive. The directive does not
currently include publicly funded cultural heritage organisations —
such as museums or galleries — within its scope. The directive could
be broadened to include these kinds of organisations, which might
encourage them to open up their content and data for others to reuse.
Opening up metadata about works and objects held by publicly funded
cultural heritage organisations could be very useful to (i) help
establish what is in the public domain in a given jurisdiction (as per
the work on the calculators) and (ii) help to bootstrap a new
generation of digital services for researchers and for the general
public.

2. Broaden the evidence base for opening up PSI. At present the
European Commission primarily focuses on the value of PSI in a fairly
narrow sense — e.g. citing the MEPSIR and PIRA study estimates of a
market size of 27 or 68 billion Euros (respectively). While this kind
of evidence is obviously crucial for European policymakers, the
Commission should also take into account other potential benefits of
opening up PSI, such as improvements to public service delivery,
greater accountability of public bodies, the intrinsic value of PSI
(e.g. cultural or educational), and enabling the creation of new
digital services for citizens. Value is not only about money!

Background at:

  http://blog.okfn.org/2010/07/08/opening-up-european-public-sector-information-two-recommendations/

Thoughts most welcome! ;-)

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg
http://identi.ca/jwyg