News

Paris’ First Open Data Bar Camp Tackles PSI Re-use Issues

Source: La Cantine / Paris Open Data Bar Camp

Opendatacamp: tout ce que vous avez toujours voulu faire avec les données publiques sans jamais oser le demander

Paris: 12 December 2009

A one day Open Data Bar Camp was held in Paris on the 12 December 2009 attracting the registration limit of 100 participants.

Under discussion was: “everything you wanted to know about what could be done with public data but were afraid to ask”.

What is a Bar Camp?

The Bar Camp is a non-conference held in workshop formats and participatory events where the content is provided by the participants who all bring something to the conference. The principle is no audience – everyone is a participant.

The context for the Bar Camp is described as:

“The information society is bringing about profound changes - services and decisions based on data and more data is being generated. Companies have quickly learned how to work data internally and with their partners. The public actors such as state or local organisations are less developed, but the data that they handle daily represents a tremendous reservoir of knowledge and potential innovation that could benefit the community for whom the data was collected.

Both France and Europe have entered into the an age where the opportunity to access and re-use data is there to animate. There are examples world wide of governments at all levels liberating their data to support the development of new services and to support democratic processes and debate.

The plan Digital France 2012 and the ‘Recovery plan’ outline measures to promote access to government data. But, in practical terms on the ground, the situation is blocked and data remains inaccessible or only available in a piecemeal way and more often than not very costly.”

The themes addressed during the Bar Camp covered the following.

Feedback on the availability of data in France, Europe and the United States
Innovation (service, users, processes) directly derived from the dissemination of
Impact perspectives (legal, sociological, economic, etc) when data is opened

The materials and commentary on the Bar Camp have been published online including three videos of the event on the topics of Activist Initiatives, Cultural Data and Ideas Drivers (in French).

Read a summary of one of the workshops: Produce a data.gov without waiting for the public actors

Who organised the Bar Camp?

The Bar Camp was hosted and sponsored by private organisations including: