Workshop organized by the European Data Portal

On 22 and 23 February, a seminar organized by representatives of the European Data Portal (EDP) and the Open Data Institute took place in Madrid, where ten public data representatives from Spain, Germany and Italy were gathered. The goals of the sessions were aimed at identifying the common challenges, refining strategies for addressing challenges through peer learning and examples of best practice and identifying opportunities for future collaborations. This workshop is part of EDP's commitments to promoting the knowledge on the openness and re-use of public sector information and strengthening the networking in the European sector. 

On the first day, attendees presented the state of the art of the open data initiative in their respective countries. Thus, in the case of Germany, in September a new open data normative, currently under review, will be adopted to make the public data collected by federal agencies be open by default. In addition, this country has recently joined the Open Government Partnership, an opportunity for the German government to improve communication with users and civic organizations.

Italy has reinforced in its legislative framework the commercial use of public data according to the guidelines referred in Directive 2013/37/EU on the re-use of public sector information. At the same time, it is working on the incorporation of the regional open data portals into the national catalogue, with special attention to geographic data, and the elaboration of publication guidelines according to the CC-BY-4.0 license and aligned with DCAT-AP_IT.

As the host country of the event, the representatives of Iniciativa Aporta analyzed the Spanish infomediary sector in the workshop, its opportunities and barriers, and they shared with the rest of the participants the international collaborative projects in which they are working, as well as the national events organized to stimulate and strengthen the open data culture in Spain.

During the second part of the day, participants discussed on the main challenges of the European PSI sector, identifying as the main challenges standardization, impact measurement, effective use of data, local implementation of open data strategies, cultural barriers and the sustainability of local portals.

Divided into different groups, the first of them focused on the standardization of open information. In this way, it was suggested that the greatest problem of standards lies in vocabularies and in the need to work from the local level towards higher levels, as in the case of Smart Cities in Spain. At the same time, the second group worked on cultural barriers and possible actions to address this obstacle, such as the development of capacities in the administrations and the community, the identification of key concepts (economic impact) or strengthening ties among the different stakeholders of the open data community.

During the second day, the results of the three last reports elaborated by EDP were shown: Open Data Maturity in Europe 2016, Recommendations for open data portals: from setup to sustainability and Re-using open data: a study on companies transforming open data into economic and societal value. 

Then, it was the turn of the session dedicated to national coordination and the possible challenges faced in the different levels of administrative management. Each country made a presentation on this subject, where they discussed how the different initiatives - local, regional, national - are coordinated in the case of Spain, or the difficulties of the decentralization of open data policies in Germany depending on each federal state.

Finally, the workshop concluded with a special session in which creating a future action plan for each of the participating nations in the event that, in the case of Spain, is aimed at improving the quality of information and measuring the impact of open data published by the public sector.

This workshop has been a good opportunity to bring together European public experts on open data and re-use of information and share their national experiences. This reinforces the idea that, thanks to international collaboration, it is possible to enrich and apply the common knowledge to continue working, from the Public Administration, in the promotion of open data and the capacity development, increasing the impact of open data.