VILNIUS 17TH SEPTEMBER 2010, 11:30-13:30
 
Internet Governance Forum 2010 - Workshop 120
“Public sector information online: democratic, social and economic potentials”

All stakeholders worldwide are invited to participate and join us in discussing the democratic social and economic potentials of public sector information online. 
 
The Workshop is taking place as part of the International Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 2010: ‘Developing the Future Together’. (http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/)
 
The Workshop is jointly organised by Proyecto Aporta (http://www.proyectoaporta.es/web/guest/index) and the European Public Sector Information Platform (ePSIplatform) (http://www.epsiplatform.eu/).
 
Registration is Open
http://www.igf2010.lt/index.php/en/welcome/index
 
 
Options for Participants:
 
1. Attend and participate in workshop 120 and the IGF5 event (onsite)
2. Participate in workshop 120 remotely via the remote moderator
3. Actively use social media tools such as twitter during the IGF5 and in particular workshop 120 to promote public sector information and the important role that it plays in society

The following bodies are involved in the presentation of workshop 120:

The Spanish Aporta project
The European Public Sector Information Platform
The Australian auPSI information platform
The KM Africa-KnowledgeHub
The Information Society Development Committee under the Government of the Republic if the Lithuania
IT for Change
Electronic Frontier Foundation
PSI Alliance

The 1st European Address Forum Conference – Addressing the Future will take place in Brussels on 15 June 2010. See details on the programme and registration

EURADIN - EURopean ADdress INfrastructure is an EU project that aims at constituting a Best Practice Network in order to promote the European Address harmonisation regarding the definition, registration and access to the European Address Data. EURADIN has been working to develop a practical implementation of the INSPIRE Directive’s address theme covering as many countries in Europe as possible.  Participants on this event will hear on the findings and conclusions of the project.
 
At the Conference, the European Address Forum (EAF) will be launched. EAF is an open forum that aims to encourage the development of well constructed addressing processes and the availability and efficient use of harmonised and good quality address data throughout Europe using the framework of the INSPIRE Directive and related standards for the benefit of citizens, business and government. EAF has been created in the context of EURADIN, but it is an open forum for all stakeholders involved in addressing processes, and in the collection, maintenance, use and dissemination of address data. At the EAF session the document that defines the objectives and sets up initial working rules of the Forum will be discussed. The document is available as a working material for participants and potential EAF members to be downloaded and reviewed prior to the event.
 
At the Conference interpretation will be provided in English, Spanish, German and Italian. 

requests the pleasure of your company at its

on Wednesday 16 June 2010, 11:00am-4:00pm

at The Residence Palace, Brussels

The PSI Alliance was established in order to encourage the public sector to maintain a trading environment that is fair and equitable, in particular in relation to the licensing and re-use of public sector information (PSI).

Members are private sector companies and associations who are committed to working with PSI holders towards the maintenance and development of a vibrant, information-driven EU economy that ultimately works to the benefit of the public sector, private sector and the end consumer.

Speakers at the Annual Conference include Javier Hernández-Ros, Head of Unit, Access to Information, European Commission; Professor Nigel Shadbolt, UK Government Information Adviser; Gustaf Johnssén, Senior Advisor, Swedish Ministry of Finance; Ignacio Durán Boo, Deputy General Director Cadastre , Spanish Ministry Economy and Finance; Michael Fanning, CEO Online Consultants International GmbH; Rolf Nordqvist, Chairman of the PSI Alliance.

The conference is free to PSI Alliance members and for non members is 95 Euros (plus VAT) before 28th May or 150 Euros (plus VAT) before 16th June.  Any non-member who attends the conference and then joins the PSI Alliance will have their conference fee deducted from the cost of membership.

For futher information and to RSVP please contact Danient Bacall: danielbacall@luther.co.uk, Tel: + 44 (0) 207 618 9100

PSI-Alliance-June-Annual-Conference-Agenda.pdf (55.1 KB)

See also the PSI Alliance website.

The Spatialist project and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT would like to invite you to their workshop on legal aspects of geographic data and spatial data infrastructures, taking place in Leuven, Belgium on 19 March.

Further details can be obtained from workshop the Flyer.pdf (202.21 KB)

Why attend this event?

Government departments are now recognising the need to improve their collection and handling of management information but many have been found to lack accurate data and the capability to link data across networks. At a time when resources are being reduced, the need for better information management has never been greater for increased operating efficiency, agility and, ultimately, cost savings.

The conference will bring together delegates from across the public sector who are involved in improving the collection, use and re-use of information to improve performance and service delivery.  By attending this event you will:

• Engage directly with senior experts in the field of information management, use and re-use
• Learn from innovative keynotes and take part in interactive panel discussions
• Attend in-depth industry-led workshops demonstrating solutions for the challenges facing you
• Network with peers and share experiences about likely challenges and how to address them

The speaker line up includes:

• Professor David Rhind CBE, Chair, Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information
• John Kirkpatrick, Director of Studies, Audit Commission
• Carol Tullo, Director, Office of Public Sector Information, part of The National Archives
• Neil Ackroyd, Director of Data Collection and Management, Ordnance Survey

Registration

For more information and to register visit www.kable.co.uk/managing-information

Capita's 6th National Information Sharing Across the Public Sector Conference has been organised to provide high level strategic guidance and practical insight into challenges and solutions of effective data sharing.

The Chair of APPSI, Professor David Rhind CBE, gave the keynote address on Creating Opportunities for Public Sector Information Sharing

• Putting data at the core of public sector organisations
• The benefits of re-use of public sector information
• Creating a culture of good data management

Programme.pdf (419.51 KB)

Data Sharing presentation (8 MB)

The Free Our Data Conference on 10 February 2009 was proof that the Free Our Data campaign is now gaining cross-party support, with the cabinet minister Tom Watson and other ministers pushing for closer investigation of the benefits of making government-collected data available for wider use. Speaking at the conference, organised by the thinktank Policy Exchange, were Charles Arthur, the Guardian's Technology editor, who is a co-founder of the Free Our Data campaign; Ed Parsons, formerly the chief technology officer at OS and now a geospatial technologist at Google; Steven Feldman, a freelance geospecialist and Shane O'Neill, APPSI's Digital Content Expert.

See coverage of the Conference in the Guardian.

Peter Wienand and Shane O'Neill of APPSI attended a seminar hosted by the the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) on Public Sector Intangible Assets - Unlocking the Potential, organised by UKIPO.  Peter chaired the session on 'Adding value'.  The seminar was designed to generate points to be taken into account in a paper on public sector intangibles being prepared for David Lammy, MP, Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property.  While the long term practical outcomes of this project are unclear, this very well-attended event involved a wide-ranging discussion, touching on such themes as public task, the value of public sector intangibles to the wider economy and society, ownership of IP versus use and distinctions between PSI and other types of intangible (such as patents).

14.01.09 Agenda.pdf (15.8 KB)

Presentations

• Chris-Jenkins,-Barriers-and-incentives-in-maximising-the-value-of-PSIAs.pdf (81.43 KB)
• Deborah-Downey,-Intangible-Value.pdf (241.65 KB)
• Iain-Laird,-Public-Sector-Intangible-Assets-Barriers-and-Incentives.pdf (113.65 KB)
• Michael-Fanning,-Public-Sector-Intangible-Assets.pdf (362.73 KB)
• Mike-Dalrymple,-Successful-translation-of-life-science-research.pdf (158.58 KB)
• Raj-Sivalingam,-public-sector-intangible-assets.pdf (82.73 KB)
• William-Perrin,-Power-of-public-information.pdf (2.06 MB)

Today, the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information is holding its annual seminar at the Oxford Internet Institute.  APPSI has invited external speakers who are key to the re-use of public sector information agenda.

Presentations

• Javier Hernandez ros Head of Unit, Access to Information, DG Information Society & Media, European Commission .pdf (183.81 KB)
• William Dutton Director Oxford Internet Institute.pdf (783.59 KB)
• John Sheridan, Head of e-Services, The National Archives
• Hector MacQueen, APPSI representative member, Scotland
• Christine Gifford, APPSI Member Information Management Community.pdf (127.53 KB)
• Vanessa Lawrence Chief Executive, Ordnance Survey .pdf (2.17 MB)
• Natalie Ceeney, Chief Executive, The National Archives

Agenda

APPSI annual seminar agenda.pdf (88.13 KB)

Pictures

Seminar Discussion.jpg (210.87 KB)

Presentation Hector MacQueen.jpg (152.91 KB)

Presentation Vanessa Lawrence.jpg (136.59 KB)

Presentation John Sheridan.jpg (163.82 KB)

Presentation Discussion Natalie Ceeney.jpg (155.93 KB)

Minutes

9.12.08-APPSI-Seminar-minutes.pdf (220.41 KB)

A double-page coverage of the PSI Conference held on 14 October 2008 can be found in Whitehall and Westminster World today, (see pp. 4-5). 

In the article headlined 'Information Age' Carol Tullo explains how PSI could stimulate the development and growth of Europe's information industry if we free up access and remove the barriers to re-use.

The article headlined 'Calls for a duty to share info' provides highlights of the panel discussion chaired by Richard Susskind, and including David Rhind, Chair of APPSI, William Perrin, Deputy Director of Transformational Government at the Cabinet Office, and Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Computer Science at Southampton University. 

The article headlined 'Minister trials data lab', covers the speech by Tom Watson, Minister for Transformational Government at the Cabinet Office, where he talked about the creation of a new facility to make best use of new data-management techniques, and referred to the some of the most innovative uses of public information.

This was chaired superbly by Richard Susskind: as a result, it ran to time and he teased out active contributions from the 80 or so people present. The speakers were also excellent and provocative. Carol Tullo, Head of the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) gave a wide-ranging and comprehensive introduction to PSI re-use and OPSI’s role. Thereafter, Jim Wretham (OSPI), Marcia Jackson (OPSI) and Ian Gibbs (Newham Council) led three policy workshops on different aspects of PSI and reported back the extensive debates to the plenary session.  The morning was concluded by Dr David Pullinger (Digital Policy Director at the COI) – who stood in for Michael Wills - speaking on ‘Service transformation and the re-use of PSI’.  In effect he described very clearly the creation of a national information infrastructure built on Web 2.0 concepts.

After lunch, Tom Watson, the newly promoted Cabinet Office Minister for Transformational Government, gave a bravura performance on what had to change. 

Thereafter, a panel of three answered questions from the audience, prompted and fired up by Richard Susskind. William Perrin (Deputy Director of Strategy and Policy, Transformational Government, Cabinet Office) argued forcefully that radical change towards a personalisation of services was both necessary for achieving government’s aims on transformational government and was readily possible.  Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Southampton University, articulated the benefits of contemporary web technology and likely developments plus their relevance to our objectives. David Rhind, Chair of APPSI spoke briefly about the contents of the APPSI letter to Michael Wills, the example of how government statistics (notably but not solely the £500m Population Census) were distributed free to all, and the issue of public trust in information where judgement was very much involved in interpretation of such information based on sampling or professional judgement, the results from which were highly politically sensitive. Important contributions from the floor were made by Chris Corbin and Shane O’Neil, amongst others.

Richard Allen (Chair of the Power of Information Task Force) followed with his own bravura performance, covering much of the ground he did when speaking to APPSI about the work of the Power of Information Taskforce. His leitmotif was ‘cumulative innovation in a knowledge economy’ and he spoke on four topics: information discovery, legal factors, commercial exploitation and challenges for the future. Some 450 entries had been received for the ‘Show Us a Better Way’ competition, two-thirds of which involved use of geospatial/geographic information or data.

The final session was a novel one with 10 minute lightening talks by each of four contributors. The first was by Javier Hernandez-Ros, the Head of the Digital Libraries and Public Sector Information Unit in the EC DG for Information Society and Media.  He started from the viewpoint that PSI was owned not by a state bureaucracy but by the populace/taxpayer. He pointed out, in response to the comment that we were all awaiting the outcome of the EC review of the Re-Use Directive, that at least one country in the EU had made re-use mandatory and so could the UK.  Christine Gifford, member of APPSI gave a barnstorming performance about the lack of present engagement in PSI from the Health Service, Gavin Starks described a commercial project  with the modest aim of creating ‘ a neutral aggregation platform to measure and track all the energy data on Earth’ which had been put together by four people working part-time and yet which already had a million footprints. Finally Brian Collins, the Chief Scientific Advisor at DfT, described the National Transport Information Incubator. This is a public/private consortium to foster innovation in bringing information in useful form to travellers. From idea to availability as a service is mandated to be less than three weeks. He stressed the importance of technology to constrain re-purposing of information wherever appropriate and the use of open standards; the final report is on the DfT website.

Conclusions: The contributions were first class, the issues addressed were important ones and there was much enthusiasm that the ‘forces of darkness’ would be overcome!  The audience left cheered and confident that the world could be made a better place through the power of information.

The conference will be profiled in a forthcoming edition of Whitehall and Westminster World.

David Rhind, Chair of APPSI has provided the following feedback on this seminar, for which he was Chair:

The 10th annual seminar of this group - whose members are drawn from top retailers and limited to 18 in total - was highly stimulating and well-organised by Keith Dugmore.  Some 80 people from the business communities, local and central government and academia attended.

The presentations were superb. They spanned the challenges of data sharing across the myriad institutions within central government (Pullinger), the extraordinary success of dunnhumby and Tesco in interpreting customer data and ‘mashing’ it with public sector information (Pavey), how to extract real insights rather than simple statistical descriptions from data (Robbins) and how to take forward the Treasury Select Committee’s recommendations to move largely to replacing the Census with the use of multiple administrative data sets (Martin).

Subsequent workshop sessions on comparing Census 2011 results with those from other data, on the need for a national address register (arguably made available in the public domain) and how to extract Insight from a forest of information were all lively and well-attended.  Finally a panel of experts (Richard Alldritt (UK Statistics Authority), Martin Bellingham (The Children’s Mutual & DUG), Jil Matheson (ONS), and Keith Dugmore (DUG)) opined on the big issues that needed to be addressed to extract both greater Value for Money from existing Public Sector Information and how to enhance trust in the quality and integrity of such information. This was one of those seminars where virtually everyone took an active part and was conducted in good humour but not uncritically.

DUG Seminar programme

Today, David Rhind, Chair of APPSI is giving a presentation at a PISCES Conference in Edinburgh. PISCES is a non profit e-commerce organisation that develops and maintains an open global industry standard for property related data exchanges. The conference will bring together approximately seventy senior executives from the public and private sectors to explore how, in this current economic climate, efficiencies through improved communication of business information can made using the latest technology and facilitated by the role of e-business standards.

Highlights of the seminar included:

• Key note address from Professor William Dutton, Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, who set out the themes he had coverd at his inaugural Oxford lecture in October 2007 - "The Fifth Estate - Through the Network of Networks".
• Presentation by Tobias Escher, Doctoral Student, Oxford Internet Institute - An introduction to Web 2.0 and what it might mean for PSI.
• Presentation by APPSI's European Expert, Chris Corbin - A View from ePSIplus
• Presentation by Carol Tullo, Director of the Office of Public Sector Information - The UK's view on the EC's review of the Directive
• Presentation by Peter Wienand, Deputy Chair of APPSI - Reflections on recent events.

See minutes of seminar for further details