[open-government] Happy new year with good news from France

[Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou]

Happy new year everyone!
(sorry about the multiposting for people on multiple lists)

Just a quick update from France to share our excitement in this
starting new year whereas some of our main advocacy pledges reach
their terms.

First, this is with great pleasure we learnt the National Assembly is
finally considering fixing its voting records. If everything goes as
intended, they should at least and at last publish nominative votes
instead of only rebels votes, and they might really fix the proxy
voting issue which creates even more opacity.
We wrote more in french about it here :
http://www.regardscitoyens.org/la-transparence-des-votes-de-lassemblee-nationale-cest-possible

On another note, the national french OpenData platform just got
relaunched, using CKAN tuned by a team of 3 people in 6 months (when
the previous platform from scratch took a contractee a year for a
million euros...). The great news about it is that the platform is
made open to anyone to contribute.  We believe this is the first time
a country lets anyone publish data or dataviz on the national opendata
platform but maybe someone here knows about another experience yet?

Last but not least, the government started following some of the
community's recommendations regarding public data still being sold by
public administrations. An official report was made and published
evaluating the about 50 paying datasets left, and about 15 were
announced to be opened next year, including the long awaited
legislation data which pushed France down in the international
indexes.

In french again about these here :
http://www.regardscitoyens.org/nouvelle-version-de-data-gouv-fr-et-liberation-de-la-dila-un-nouveau-souffle-pour-lopendata-gouvernemental
And In english about the news data.gouv.fr by OKFN France
<http://blog.okfn.org/2013/12/26/share-improve-and-reuse-public-sector-data-french-government-unveils-new-ckan-based-data-gouv-fr/>
and the administration in charge of it (Etalab)
<http://www.etalab.gouv.fr/article-the-next-generation-of-data-gouv-fr-a-community-of-publishers-and-users-of-open-government-data-121659708.html>.

Of course all of this won't leave us at rest: the company's registry
aka SIRENE still costs 25000€ a year and the Senate's votes still
violates the constitution
<http://www.regardscitoyens.org/les-senateurs-refusent-de-moderniser-leurs-scrutins-archaiques-et-inconstitutionnels/>,
and so on... But things go forward!

Wishing the best and a happy new year to everyone,

Benjamin for Regards Citoyens