[open-government] Thanks and french news (good & bad)

Mon Nov 22 09:35:11 UTC 2010

Everyone,

We also would like to thank everyone for this great event. It was
really nice meeting with known and new faces !

We just wanted to put the word out that our CKAN instance called
NosDonnees.fr (OurData) will be released next Friday (26th) along with
an ongoing data hunt for french datasets. The release will be shown
during an evening event in Paris (in french) which will host a panel
with legal, citizen, journalistical, entreprenarial & administrative
views on opening data.
Details in french here:
http://www.regardscitoyens.org/et-si-on-organisait-une-%C2%AB-chasse-aux-tresors-de-lopendata-%C2%BB/

On another french note, there will be a full-day event in the city of
Rennes on the following Monday (29th). Rennes is known mediatically to
be the most advanced french city on opening public sector information.
Their data are not completely open though since you need to register
to download the data. The topic of the event will mainly address local
open data, and it will be organized by various french organisation and
EpsiPlatform. We're concerned since the event will include a licence
workshop which will be hosted by the french APIE. This official
administration works on releasing some not so open licences,
forbidding commercial use in some cases or requesting fees for
exemple. One of us will attend it and will try to counterbalance on
this. But since the event will be mainly in english, if any of you is
around, feel free to come along and bring a fresh view towards more
openness :)
Information here: http://www.epsiplus.net/news/events/opendata_and_re_use

Last but not least, we discovered this week-end some frightening news.
The French governement proposed an amendment to a bill, in debate this
week at the national assembly, which creates the possibility of a «
morality control » (done by the police) to every person that requests
public data or documents for reuse. We hope we will be able to clear
this from the bill. We've just published a post in french on our blog
and we're trying to give it some mediatic echo. Any help is welcome !
http://www.regardscitoyens.org/?p=2746

Cheers !

Benjamin, Benoit & Tangui for Regards Citoyens