Progress Report 1 December 2014

This version: http://www.w3.org/2013/share-psi/PR1-20141201/
Latest version: http://www.w3.org/2013/share-psi/PR/

Share-PSI 2.0 Progress Report December 2014 by Share-PSI 2.0 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Overview

The Share-PSI 2.0 Thematic Network brings together a very broad range of stakeholders in the reuse of public sector information to help them to reach consensus on technical standards, complementing existing and ongoing initiatives in the domain. The network's focus is on implementing the revised PSI Directive and includes government agencies and ministries from a variety of member states as well as standards bodies, academic institutions, commercial companies working in the field and organisations that effectively interface between government and citizens using open data as the medium. The network will identify the most appropriate standards to be used in the publication of open data, highlight the need for further standards work, and share experiences of using those standards.

To achieve this, the project is organising a series of 5 workshops around Europe during 2014 and 2015. The events and the resultant reports will inform participating standards bodies of the relevant community needs. In the case of W3C, which is coordinating the work, there is a direct communication and overlap of personnel with its Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group. The work in that group is being directly influenced by Share-PSI 2.0.

The final result of the project will be that national, sectoral and community guidelines around technical aspects of Public Sector Information will be created, or updated, taking into account the information exchanged at the workshops and codified by the standards bodies.

It is this direct involvement in the standardisation process and the subsequent publication of guidelines for selecting and using those standards that will ensure that Share-PSI 2.0 has a lasting impact.

The Workshops

The first workshop was held as part of the Samos Summit and took Uses of open data within government for innovation and efficiency as its theme. There were 85 participants in what was organised as a traditional workshop with individuals presenting their work and taking questions afterwards. The report summarises the main points made during the workshop and draws a number of conclusions:

First and foremost, there needs to be a strategy that coordinates the efforts of multiple agencies.
The strategy needs the support of senior officials who are empowered to provide top down authority where required.
Local action is, however required. Internal processes in multiple agencies will need to be applied to meet a common goal but the local aspect is important for success.
Benefits accrue in different ways: through improved efficiency, improved effectiveness at fulfilment of the public task, and through greater trust brought about through greater transparency.
The most successful examples of data reusage tend to be around transport, spending tied to contracts and company registers, location and statistics. Among these, more work needs to be done to improve the representation of location in public sector information. Efforts to improve the interoperability and visualisation of statistics are impressive.

Many of these points are policy-oriented, rather than technical. For example, the need for a clear strategy that enjoys support at the highest level, whilst true, is out of scope for a technical standards body. However, there were many other points made during the workshop and these are being incorporated into the W3C Data in the Web Best Practices working group's Use Cases and Requirements document.

The 'Family Photo' of all attendees of the first day of the Samos Summit — The 'Family Photo' showing all the attendees on day 1 of the Samos Summit

The Share-PSI 2.0 network itself is large and includes many of the key people and organisations concerned with PSI across all but a handful of EU member States. In that sense, the network represents a significant fraction of its own target audience. The partners are proud that since the project began, two more partners have joined. These are Open Data France and the Albanian Institute of Science which has an active an effective programme around open government data in that country.

It is clear from the partner list that expertise and experience is not in short supply. Perhaps as a direct result of this, the most popular sessions at Samos were not the paper presentations but the bar camp sessions. Held at the end of the two day event, individuals were able to pitch ideas for discussions among the group. 10 participants pitched their suggestions that, after a little negotiation and voting with feet, became 4 parallel discussions that explored specific areas in more detail. The success and popularity of these sessions lead to a final conclusion from Samos:

Facilitated discussions around a particular topic proved very popular and this will affect the nature of the next Share-PSI 2.0 workshop in Lisbon in December.

It is for this reason that the agenda for the Lisbon event includes two bar camp sessions and only two short plenary presentation sessions. The bulk of the workshop comprises parallel sessions where presentations are all-but banned. Session leaders are being asked to facilitate a conversation around their topic rather than present a pre-cooked solution. On the plus side, this means that the Share-PSI partners are enthusiastic about the event and confident that it will be successful. At the time of writing more than 220 participants have registered. On the down side, the workshop does not provide an ideal opportunity to present existing work based around a citable paper. One can speculate that this is what lies behind the relatively low number of session ideas elicited by the call for participation.

The format of the event has, however, attracted several other projects. At least 8 other EU-funded projects will be represented in Lisbon, including most notably in this context, LAPSI 2.0 which is looking at the legal aspects of the revised PSI Directive and so complements Share-PSI 2.0 perfectly. As an aside, Share-PSI is participating in LAPSI's final event a few days before the Lisbon workshop.

Next steps

After Lisbon, the next workshop will be held in the Romanian city of Timişoara. Hosted by the West University, the original topic was to be Identifying data sets for publication, however, as the Samos experience shows, that topic is perhaps too heavily focused on policy matters cf. technical ones. The topic has therefore been expanded a little to Open Data Priorities and Engagement. The call for participation will be promoted heavily by the network partners during and after the Lisbon event. At the time of writing, it is anticipated that the parallel discussion format will be repeated in Timişoara rather than the presentation-based format used in Samos but the outcome of the Lisbon event will be decisive.

Timisoara - Victory Square — Victory Square, Timişoara Photo: Antonius Plaian

After Timişoara, two further workshops are planned. In May, as part of CeDEM, the International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government 2015 at the Danube University in Krems, Share-PSI will look at A self sustaining business model for open data. Where Lisbon is focuses on external use of data, the Krems event will look at effective models within the public sector to sustain publication and maintenance of PSI. Fraunhofer, FOKUS will host the final workshop in the series in Berlin looking at Maximising interoperability: core vocabularies, location-aware data and more. This is likely to be the most technology-focussed of the workshops.

In the final phase of the project, through to July 2016, the partners will be preparing (or updating) guidelines based on the workshops and the standards bodies' work. These will, naturally, by in the relevant language(s) and take into account local institutions, practices and legal frameworks.