Today France releases its action plan for the implementation of the Charter, and specifically commits to releasing more governement datasets and APIs for hackers and startups to experiment with.
Specifically, we're committing to:
- progressing towards publishing data openly by default,
- building an open platform to encourage innovation and transparency,
- developing Open Data policy in consultation with citizensand civil society,
- supporting open innovation in France and throughout the world.
I'd be very interested in HN's feedback on how useful this can be for you, and what else you'd like to know about our Open Data policy and how we're trying to improve it!
Documents and data are not the same...
I'm french, and NOT proud of it
If you've followed http://etalab.gouv.fr (mostly in French, sorry), you may have heard we launched an open and collaborative re-design process in the spring and summer, which lead to more than 60 substantial contributions and 9 events organized by our community of users throughout France.
We then brought in a team of hackers to work inside of government -- believe it or not, this is most likely the first instance of this in the French government; unsurprisingly it worked very well -- and redevelop the whole stack based off of CKAN.
Our code is live on http://www.github.com/etalab if you'd like to check it out. Stay tuned!
Now, if Danish lawmakers would only take a hint...
Just because it's not done by the book all the way doesn't we shouldn't salute the effort.
Just imagine a startup making such an announcement on HN, to show only XLS documents, and calling it OpenData... Well, that's just what it looked like when that post made it to the front page of HN.
Recently, the government proudly announced an "OpenData" website about drugs... but it proved to be a website where documentation about drugs could be read online. It existed YEARS before, and it doesn't become OpenData just because it's hosted by the gov! No raw data, no API: there will be no app which allows you to scan barcodes and tell you about conflicts between drugs, no app to prevent adverse effects depending on you health condition. No app I can imagine, no app you can imagine. They just wasted our money for no added benefit.
I think they (France) do not understand what OpenData is.
Data does not become OpenData just because it's accessible on the net. It's OpenData if you can build something with it.
Think "source code in PDF format on GitHub" and you should agree that OpenSource and OpenData must be more than simply available online.
http://ddata.over-blog.com/xxxyyy/4/37/99/26/licence/Licence...
We developed the "Open Licence" in consultation with citizens, the Open Government Data community in France (Wikimedia Foundation, Regards Citoyens, etc.), and governments worldwide (the Transparency Team at the Cabinet office in London) during a series of more than 50 workshops and meetings in 2011.
Glad you like it. Feel free to send feedback and/or <3 to my team mate Alexandre Quintard (@AlexandreQK) of Etalab (data.gouv.fr).
[1]: http://staging.citybik.es/networks/velib
EDIT: Forgot to add, I should also release my data under a license and have contemplated using the "Open Licence", but I am not yet sure on what will suit best.
http://www.revolution-fiscale.fr/img/g1-1.pdf
If you cannot understand French : on the horizontal axis you got the income percentile, and the real tax rate on the vertical axis. The real tax rates may seem high, but they are pretty average for Europe.
The nominal tax rate is not enough to gauge the real tax pressure. The French system is well known for having many "tax niches" (as we call the tax loopholes)
The three researchers are Camille Landais (Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research), Thomas Piketty (Paris school of Economics) and Emmanuel Saez (Berkeley).
Edited to correct : wealth percentage --> income percentile
In the current context, I can hardly see any window for introducing disruptive innovation (I mean it, there is room for that) in France. Those who wants don't have money (mayors, univs, scientists), and those who have don't want it cause of so many reasons (employment would be the first).
Stays the middle-size societies, where the entry ticket is damn so high and who are busy too think about the next tax that will be created/canceled/rebranded/transformed/increased/wasted.
Whether or not there is room for disruptive innovation for France, only the future will tell -- and those who build it. :)
All I can say is that we're hard at work to make the most of the transformative power of open data and direct collaboration with hackers and startups, and this plan is a significant commitment from our government which I wanted to share with the HN community for constructive feedback.
(PS for what it's worth: I'm an entrepreneur myself, launched a venture-backed startup in the Valley in 2008-2010 myself which was later acquired.)
Building on the OpenSource CKAN project is a good thing. Similarly, you should thrive to help people build on OpenData.
What really concerns me is the actual data that's made available, more than the technology used to serve it.
For the time being, it looks more like electronic document management than OpenData to me. The philosophy behind OpenData is not just "let's put office documents online", it should be more "let's see what they'll do with our data". Otherwise, where's the innovation? (except for the ideology)
The three stated objectives of France's open data policy are: 1. to make government more transparent and accountable, 2. to improve public policies and public service delivery, and 3. to enable entrepreneurs and civic innovators to develop create new services based on this data.
That's why we've brought together more than 30 key players in the French innovation ecosystem (VCs, angels, research institutions but also media, larger French corporations, Google, Microsoft etc.) and organized a series data-driven startup contests called DataConnexions.
You can check the best projects from the first 3 editions (from early 2012 onwards): http://www.etalab.gouv.fr/recherche/?query=dataconnexions
My personal favorite is an app developed jointly with the Greater Paris transport authority that uses context-based modeling to predict train occupancy levels at each time of the day, in real-time, taking into account any perturbation on the network and live feedback from users: http://tranquilien.com