[open-government] [euopendata] Two recommendations on opening up European PSI

Mon Jul 12 06:37:14 UTC 2010

Hi,

 > Value is not only about money! (from below)

I completely agree that the monetary value is not the only value. This 
is good argument as long as the opening does not include significant 
monetary costs.

Problem is that also the cost side of PSI is mostly unknown and 
speculative. In some cases opening some dataset does not cost much, but 
sometimes the opening requires some investments in the infrastructure 
and sometimes it may cause losses of income for certain public 
organizations.

How big are the investmets? How much money have been put to activities 
related to data.gov.uk for example? Are there good examples of opening 
something relatively cheaply?

> 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! ;-)
> 