place: Node 5, Prague
time: 6.10.2013, 19:00-22:00

Due to attendance of foreign guests from LOD project, official language of the conference was English thus also my notes are in English.

Notes

Thomas Thurner (Semantic Web Company): A policy of small steps: Open Government Data becomes mature Linked Open Government Data - the Vienna example

  • good results with Open Data in the city and the rest of Austria is thanks to good community, as the official Vienna Open Data strategy does not exists
  • a lot of cities started with Open Data separately at almost same time => now they are coordinating
  • WienWin: new project, attempting to unify vocabularies and create Linked Data
  • SPARQL queries can often replace dedicated apps

Sander van der Waal (Open Knowledge Foundation): How the Open Data Census helps citizen hold their governments to account

What are they going to do with the data they compile in the Census?

  • compare countries
  • use it to lobby further those countries which have still something to do when t comes to publishing truly Open Data
  • take a look at same types of datasets from many countries and think about how to link them (i.e. how to create Linked Open Data from multiple datasets available in various formats)
  • ...

Pavla Brady (První náměstkyně primátora Opavy): Open Data in Opava

  • Open Data is the next step in their transparency strategy
  • right now they are analyzing data they have in order to find out how to most easily and properly publish them
  • political condition is: zero price + clerks need to do their usual work first
  • mayor had some concerns about dangers of publishing the data, which needed to be addressed

Roman Řípa (Rozpočet obce): Explore & Influence Your Municipality Budget, start at your doors to improve the whole country

http://www.slideshare.net/rozpocetverejne/roz-ver-opendatacomunity20131004

  • use case: I have a kid and need kindergarten. But there is none available. What can I do?
    • look how much is my city spending on kindergartens
    • compare that spending with other cities
    • based on that I can formulate my input for the change in budgeting and contact the relevant officials
  • some nice stats: budget income per citizen:
    • lowest: around 5000 CZK
    • highest: more than 500'000 CZK

Panel questions

Lessons learned about politicians

  • roughly there are 10% who showed interest, 80% is passive and 10% is actively resisting (using lawyers, etc.)
  • we need to work carefully with those first 10%, not to loose them, to make good example of them
    • so the the rest can follow

What about when public service is outsourced or performed by city owned for profit company?

  • Even in that case, the data held by company should be Open
  • It is a problematic setup (from "open" point of view) and should be addressed.

We need a dataset of use-cases and positive outcomes for Open Data

Yes.

Open Data work - is it all voluntary? or who is paying for it?

  • for OKF: They are foundation, receiving grants. Plus they are doing paid work (for example installing CKAN for various organizations). But a lot of their results was achieved thanks to volunteers giving their time and expertise.
  • for research: Quite often Open Data is linked with Semantic Web, research in which is being financed by EU and also other organizations. Plus they do receive some funds for Open Data work from foundations.

Private data protections

Urad pro ochranu osobnich udaju is one of the obstacles for Open Data. Opava already received a penalty for (what is seen) as minor deficiency in their process of publishing video recordings of city council meetings and its metadata.Graphity

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