IGF 2010
VILNIUS, LITHUANIA
17 SEPTEMBER 2010
SESSION 120
1130
PUBLIC SECTOR INFORMATION ONLINE:
DEMOCRATIC, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC POTENTIALS
********
Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during Fifth Meeting of the IGF, in Vilnius. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
*******
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, I think we would like to make a start as it's 11:30. Welcome to workshop 120 which is The Public Sector Information Online: Democratic Social and Economic Potentials.
Welcome also to all those listening across the world and remotely connected into the workshop. I would like to think at the early stage the scribers who we need to keep in mind when we speak. We need to not speak too fast and we've been requested to speak clearly so that the transcription can actually be kept up.
And I would like to also thank Keisha Taylor our remote moderator because our remote moderator unfortunately didn't arrive here in Vilnius, so thank you very much, Keisha.
I'm Christopher Corbin, and I will tell you a little more about myself in a minute.
I would like to ask the panel assembled here to introduce themselves, say who they are, what their affiliation is in one or two sentences, needs to be only one or two sentences about their as a position as a stakeholder within the PSI community.
There's one other thing I should say. We have one panel member missing who is en route from Hong Kong whose flight connection in Copenhagen late last night didn't work and only just arrived in Vilnius and should be here soon.
So this really is just in time. If you want to speak to any of the speakers, two of them will be leaving fairly soon after the workshop, including the lady who's about to turn up from Hong Kong because she's going straight back to Hong Kong.
I would like to start with Paminder.
>> PAMINDER JEET SINGH: I'm from we work from public sector information and environment from advocacy at national level and from our field projects, we try to use new possibilities of communities using public sector information from the democracy and my substantive presentation will give you a fairly good picture of what kind of activity that is. Thank you.
>> ROLF NORDQVIST: I'm Rolf Nordqvist I come from the other side of the Baltic Sea, I'm a real re user of information. I've been working with that for 20 years. I'm part of a company called Bisnode and we're only doing one thing, selling digital information.
I'm also the Chairman of PSI alliance, that's an organisation for European company who wants to push the PSI question further own. We're now covering around 200 companies. That's what I want to say about myself.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Thank you.
>> ANTONIO SARAVIA: I'm Antonio Saravia coming from Spain. I'm here with a Spanish project coming from Spain. In order to promote a culture of reuse of information from Spain embracing the oneness and importance of information, and facilitating the provision of availability information and promoting transparency and reuse in Spain.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Thank you, Antonio.
>> I'm Ann Fitzgerald, I'm from Queensland university and I've worked with governments at the federal and state level at developing legal frameworks for access to public sector information, so identifying legal barriers to public sector access and reuse and have also worked with the creative common Australia team to develop models of implementation of creative commons copy right licensing in the public sector.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Thank you, Ann. Now, I would like to go back to myself, first of all. As I've mentioned, I represent the European public sector information platform. What that is is a European Commission funded, serviced, which monitors the implementation of the public sector information directive across the European Union and the European free trade area.
The information service contains information being monitored for nine years now. We have a repository contains information that has good practice about the law about how the directive is working within the European Union, but also how this is working within other areas of the world where they we can actually detect them.
So, for example, it covers things in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, even recently we started to monitor the data.gov portal in Kenya, which shows you the sort of breadth. So it's a huge database of information, that's its first purpose.
The second purpose it has is to try and raise the awareness, because to raise the awareness in the PSI community, which is made up of many thousands of public sector bodies, each of those containing thousands of employees then the potential he users of that information is vast, those that monitor or track the open data movement, you can see the amount of activity and interest going on around the world in reusing public sector information.
So that's what the public sector information platform is about.
It's predominantly in the English medium language. The European Commission is going to continue running it for a further two to three years and at that time it will be one of the largest databases in the world containing information specifically about the reuse of public sector information, including all of what the panelists are doing.
The in order to run this session, we're going to ask some questions of the panel and I'll read those out. While they're answering them, we would like you to think about the questions because we would like you, both in the room and remotely, to also think about what they've said and come forward if you have other alternatives.
Public sector information is very broad. It covers things from the law right through to things in museums, anything the public sector holds. It covers meter logical information, public sector information, for reuse, any information which is not personally related. So anything personally related and protected by the European, if you're in European, European data law, then that has to apply and not actually released.
To give you an example of public sector information and what's been reused, the European commission itself is a public body. About three years ago it opened up its linguistic database. Everything in those 23 languages has texts and the European union is in constant communication and we translate those languages into other languages.
Three years ago the European Commission that holds that information opened that up for reuse free of charge and it moved into the reuse domain within weeks, and one of the things there that you may not detect, which is one of the things that happens in the reuse of PSI, you may not even be aware that some of the translation facilities you use when you're online actually utilize some extent that data coming out of that database.
So as an example of reuse.
The first question I would like to ask each of the panel members is to ask them, briefly, to highlight one specific Democratic social or economic potential of PSI reuse most relevant to them? Ah ha. Let's just pause a second. Here's Waltraut. Well done, welcome.
Before I do the panel question, I'll let Waltraut to settle in. She's the lady that's just come from Hong tong. Would you like to introduce yourself?
>> WALTRAULT RITTER: Yes, I'm Waltraut Ritter, I work for the Asia Pacific Intellectual Capital Centre and I work in Hong Kong and we have been exploring PSI issues in Hong Kong and China for the past three years.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Okay. The panel now has two minutes to answer the question which I'll just repeat. It's to briefly highlight one specific Democratic or social economic potential of PSI most relevant in its use, and I'll start with.
>> PAMINDER JEET SINGH: I'll really talk briefly, though I must frame my response by saying the work we do is on the edges on the commission the public sector is engaged with. I'll get down to complexities that are different than what the European Union is doing, the principles and objectives are almost directly the same.
This is a benefit and I just want you to remember that, but I would now go back to the question of one use I consider very important. So one of the central things in our project, which we have started, is of use of public information for what we call as committee generated content. This is one complexity of what is the development situation. Development situation relies on collectors more than individuals and are generally the western society is allowed the data, and therefore the discussions are around PSI environment and would also be not only based, but here in development situation there are modernized people that get the collection the information and use the social and community capital and the community generated information where this communities are using public sector information about them and recommendations and the public sector information to collect public information and to that information later to get in governments.
The public sector information, the typical census information is not just to help people control and govern them and provide them with that information, but it's supposed to be helping the make the authorities have the information systems claim entitlement and rights as to self government for micro planning and pick up information from the different parts of the public sector and help communities to create information systems.
And also this work which we do, we try to help them get to the committee for the we want the community to use the committee dedicated systems for micro planning and on the other side we use this work to influence the design of the public sector information systems. Thank you.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Rolf?
>> ROLF NORDQVIST: Yes. We seem to talk about very different questions, but I'll talk about what's most important in the Nordic countries and overall of Europe, is that the responsibility between the public sector and private sector. They have different responsibilities and if they incorporate, they could be good projects. I'll point out the basic register, the infrastructure for all basic information.
That means for all countries we have registers, all companies over buildings, over vehicles even and over persons. That is basically used to produce information in the private sector. The government gets the infrastructure, the government gives out the information, the identity, what these objects are and they declare the quality.
So if you get the infrastructure or the credit companies, they can put their own information to these objects and make products of value to the government information. So I will urge any country to start with infrastructure, to start with the basic registers.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Thank you. Antonio?
>> ANTONIO SARAVIA: Thank you. Well, time to highlight something about the PSI. In Spain we started single opportunity about the clinical growth. We can see the potential of PSI potential. In Spain we're trying to change our, let's say, productive model. We try to do, based on the title, innovation and background. And we can say that PSI reuse is part of this idea.
So we think we promote the PSI, we promote growth in the digital industry and for us it's a target. In PSI this transparency of open data, in order for a citizen that has the knowledge about the public institutions, activities, and make us more transparent and access, so to highlight something, we're responsive, we expect to have critical growth and as well of the transparency to citizens is what we would like to highlight.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Thank you. Ann?
>> ANNE FITZGERALD: It's hard to limit oneself to one specific PSI reuse, if I were to nominate one Australian context, there's a great amount of benefit, particularly social and economic to be obtained from concentrating on how we can access and reuse, say, environmental information, environmental data.
Obviously, with climate change challenges, there's more pressing need to have access by researchers to environmental data. We can see the example recently where the university researchers did not give access to their climate change data for fear of how it would be analyzed and interpret by others. It might not actually achieve the same outcome as they would like through their own analyses.
Increasingly, we actually have, in many countries like Australia, we have different research groups fund by the public sector in connected their research operating at different levels of company. We have research in one country collaborating with searched in any other country. If we're going to effectively address the channels which are very well are client change, we could change not only social but economic value was developing projects around reuse of public sector information related to all kinds of environmental issues.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Thank you. Waltraut?
>> WALTRAULT RITTER: Maybe I need to explain in Hong Kong there is no PSI guideline or anything at the moment, so we are in the very beginning of this whole development.
I think for the other countries you have the EU direct and the OECD recommendation on PSI. So for countries who are members in either of those theaters, there are very clear guidelines on how to create economic value from public information.
In the rest of the world, I think the question is, first of all, how do you get this topic on the agenda? And in Asia, information by default is a secret. So we have a very long way to go to create a kind of awareness that public information has the potential of being a public asset accessible to all.
I think there are very few countries in outside the U.S. and EU where you have access to information. And so the second step then is to see once this information is available, what can we do with these intangible assets that can create value?
So I think that is quite a long journey. In Hong Kong we focus on the economic aspect because Hong Kong is advanced service and trade economy and is only interested in how to how do we get some return on anything.
So therefore we focus on the economic benefit and, basically, educating the business community and the public to see information as an economic resource.
And so I think in that sense, Europe is already ahead in understanding that information is actually a resource. And so that's something we are working on at the moment and in terms of legislation, there is only a code of access to information, which is an administrative code from 1995, but there is no mentioning of anything like information is an economic resource. It only is a right of the citizen to access certain data that's held by the government.
So I think for advanced knowledge economies in Singapore, Asia, Taiwan and others, the question is how to get this on the agenda in the first place. Thanks.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Thank you.
Thank you, very much. I was watching there and I could see you still talking. The panel has brought
>> The panel has brought out some interesting aspects and shows you the complexity of opening up PSI reuse. What we've heard here is the Democratic use, first of all, which is mentioned by two at least of the panelists and how important that is at the local level. Included in that, I sense from what Paminder was saying was the role of parts of society that are excludes, so you have an intermediary using a PSI to help them develop the local economy and engage them. One of the areas I've heard a lot since I've been at the IGF 5 this week is lack of local content and this is a quick way of, in fact, getting local content by opening up for local communities.
On the other aspect, we've heard that to make the reuse really work in societies or countries where this PSI has been policy principles are being applied, that it only works successfully if the public sector and the commercial re users as opposed to the Democratic free type of reuse work closely together. So in other words it's a partnership. I wouldn't sigh it's a private PPD, but clearly you have to work together to achieve that to flourish.
That then give it is public sector a dilemma because we heard from Antonio that they have two opposing things to do, besides looking at the data on the behalf of society that they governed. One is to try to support the Democratic process and enabling that Democratic process enables the right to access the laws of the country for free, to see what the core decisions are and what the things are that apply to the individuals on the one side.
Yet on the other side, they're wanting to develop the economy through generating jobs and so they're trying to encourage the reuse through commercial entities to create employment and Rolf represents a company which has many thousands of people employed, so they range from a very small one or two person sort of entity, reuse information, right through to companies which are using a lot.
How does the public sector body holding this information achieve that balance? And the last thing which has come across very clearly is where are countries and board members of the OEDC, how do you start? Probably you've already engaged the politician somehow into that domain to get the movement which we can discuss later on?
I would like to ask, first of all, whether there with any questions coming remotely? None.
So I would like to ask you within the room whether you have any comments to make on what you've heard, first of all? Thank you. Please give your name and affiliation. The gentleman is coming.
>> Hello. My name is Danielle Duvier with the Worldwide Web Consortium. We're all in favor of PSI and been pushing that in few countries. We have three remark. I think the fact that the PSI input is given by both the public data and the citizen is very important because you can imagine that, you know, the police report about accident can be put online, but there are a lot of bad incident, you know, that people can put online as well. The same thing can be used by both.
The second thing is the PSI the role of PSI itself, I'm not sure it does that, but since the idea of PSI since it's machine understandable data, you can actually collect it with a programme, I think it as an organisation that sort of watch what's happening over deployment, I think you are overwhelmed enough to be trying it, testing it because it's only a programme that you going to access every country and show people everything you do across the other. It's not just the the wireless not just to make sure countries are doing something and free to test it because you have the machine of understandable criteria.
The last thing is about the language that people are using to actively give meaning to this data. You mention that English and Europe is being used. I guess in Spain you're using Spanish. I wonder as a French person going to Barcelona all the time I would like to note the accident in the Barcelona area, I would like to know of accident but don't speak Spanish, are people going to deal with the language barriers around this issue? When I go back to a national, sort of, services because the language would only work in the country?
And regarding the partnership I heard another not the word partnership, but I think of course, the to have commercial application and application in general being written, that's going to happen as soon as data is out so it's national. But in terms of having a machine that's commercial process individual, I think the model should be we should use open standard to process data.
This way commercial and individual and Open Source, anybody who's got an ability to programme can actually use the data. You don't need a partnership. The partnership is open standard and there for everybody.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Any other questions before I ask the panel to respond? Yes?
>> Annette from Berlin. We have open questions already, but the Democratic elements but also there are other elements which were not mentioned at all yet. What are the problems? So I would like to know, what are the problems? I think there is a finance problem here.
Talking about what Mr. Just before me, he just mentioned, I think it's absolutely true. We need open standards and it has to be readable as a how do you call it? A machine.
So but who pays for it? And in Germany we have a huge financial problem on the commuter level, you know, we close down the child care I mean, there is no public money and now here we go and there are all these IT industries asking for open standards transparency and Microsoft now is one of the big people pushing transparency. And at the same time, asking for public investment to get this done.
So how does it work, this is one issue, what are the costs? Secondly, and I'm absolutely pro open government, open data and open standards, I just want to say, but how does it work? So what are the problems.
The other issue is, copy right. You didn't say any word about copy right. We do have great archives, film and all this, and, yes, we do have some problems here. So what do we do about this. What can you make available under what sixes. All these issues receive toll we have to tackle to be efficient and really Democratic about those.
I want to hear some things about the problems to be solved. Thank you.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Thank you. Are there any other questions? No.
Okay. What we'll do now is ask the panel to respond to the all of those points and I'll start with Waltraut.
>> WALTRAULT RITTER: I just have a rather brief comment. We don't I think there's a difference between open data open data government and PSI discussion. So the open data discussion is maybe in the Internet site in Hong Kong or other small NGO that deal with this kind of topic.
And, of course, the government is looking at records management and standardization of data across different government agencies, but we don't really have this open government data of discourse of our business community at the moment.
We talk about eGovernment which has some elements of cross sharing data, but we don't use, as in other countries, this label of open got data countries. In US it's facial which allows you to rely on partial reuse of information. It's not all information of the government is open for reuse. It is selected parts of government data that are, perhaps, suitable for reuse. That is the kind of official policy.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Okay.
>> ANNE FITZGERALD: I guess if questioner from Germany raised some interesting, challenging kind of questions. Um, okay in Uruguay we have focusing on how to use the PSI is a sensible thing to do so we don't have to pay again for people to do work that's already been done. So if you can publish it and make it available in a repository so people know it's been done. Too often we've had money wasted.
Having better access to government information so it can be analyzed really helps to affect your decision making about where money can be most effect I. spent. So often we have inefficiency say. We can have better access and better informed decisions.
I worked a lot in copy right area. Too often governments say there is copy right in this and we will use copy right as a way of restricted materials to materials. One of the things we have done is turned copy right around to drive openness.
So by using creative common licensing in government, it means the default is that the material is made available for access. It will be able to be used and reused in a it essentially reinforces the open understand of material that comes from a public sector. It works against it being re prioritized as soon as it is passed out from the government to the resellers or aggregators.
So government can effectively use copy right to give a fit to its open access and reuse policies.
>> ANTONIO SARAVIA: Too many questions, maybe, again. Well, of course we are for open standards, about analyzing the copy right. All this is addressed on the European and national level. It's being discussed and we expect to have some research, some recommendations because we know that without any recommendation, everybody or government will take that away and maybe this government and this decision, that is no good. We expect to have open open record will help us out soon.
With an example with the balance of the information given by users and behalf of the official portal, given by the administration, the police for instance, of course, a platform who perhaps users, data coming from the users, the government agency is much better. The problem is, who wants to do that, okay?
It's not that simple. We see the platform, they give them a contest called Alagatos in order to develop. In 48 hours to develop applications on PSI reuse, okay? It was a contest, okay, everybody together in the room try to do something with the PSI.
One of the applications was about the situation of the traffic. And the best solution was a measure of the information coming from the government and the information coming from the user, give it to me. The information using Twitter could help the system have better information. So of course they they found it very useful. He put on the platform and we see, of course, the government could do that but they consider that the product initiative is much better.
They put the bricks of the society to applications and resolution. This was a clear example of an application which helps us quickly.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Antonio, do you have any response to the fact that it's in Spanish language and the French speaker can't read it?
>> ANTONIO SARAVIA: Unfortunately, we don't have good solution about the language. 23 languages, maybe, okay. It's very difficult. The same language, common language with south American and Latin country. We understand, but of course, that is a subject, okay. The person about the language, okay, we have to get semantic in the data to one application to understand the semantic and the languages, but it is not of course, it's a problem. But when people may be coming from universities, researchers to help us to get the bases.
In order to alert, to put the application that understand the meaning and not total the language. I think it's important, but we don't have yet a solution at this moment. Maybe you? I don't know.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Thank you. Okay.
>> ROLF NORDQVIST: I have to talk about the problems. I work with this every day in almost every country in the Europe. There are enormous problems to get the information. I can start with a few of them.
The first is go to any authority and ask them what kind of real information do you have in reusable format for me to use, what is the price and what is the conditions, and you will be happy to get any answers because they don't have it.
In Sweden it was a country where we are very far ahead with using information, I only know one authority that has this on their own page, one authority of hundreds of authorities. That's a big problem you don't know what information it is. Second problem is they might answer you and say we don't have data and it costs you four times more to get the data than the real data. They say it has to be certain quality, that's a very big word they use all the day. I say, I don't care about your quality, I want the raw data.
They say, we don't have the raw data. That's a big problem. You go to the authority and say sorry? In some cases they don't have it. In some cases the realisation is very low, but in the Nordic countries they always have it. Everything is digitalized. It's hidden behind somewhere and they say, oh, no, it's only for our own use eaten you can't have the value added data. If you have the value added data, they say, it's our copy right. If you use the data, you will have to follow the following instructions.
10 pages of what you can't do with the data. I don't want to have any instructions. I want to have data to use freely and use in my own products. That is very important.
Times they say you can get the data but the price is 5 million. 5 million? I don't have 5 million. The price is 5 million because the government has told us to get the money because we have a poor government who needs the money, it's a financial crisis. We need the money and we need the authorities to take in the money. So what they are doing, they are getting out, competing on the field.
Sometimes you find them as competitors out in the field with them prices, but they have set them. It's a lot of different obstacles to get them. It's not easy, we as a big company have the muscles, the lawyers, we can fight and go to court. The small companies can't go to court. It costs you enormous money.
I have a court case that's seven years old. I fighting for seven years to get information because our opponent has good lawyers.
So it could be a problem getting into a court process because it will cost you a lot of money. So the real, real, real reason for that this is a problem is a lack of understanding of the government people how real companies are working. What is a commercial company and how are they thinking? I don't think they know how we're thinking and that means ewe don't won't announcing, we can't a market that's waiting for us.
I could continue for a long time. It's not easy to get information. If someone here can tell me that there are other experiences, please tell me. Where is it easy to get information to really use. And now I'm talking about that you can have a price on for your customer that you can earn money on make presence dent and get return on your investment.
So it's not an easy world and I would call Germany one of the nightmare if I would be very honest. It's 17 Bunderstadt. They have 17 kinds of information. You can get a report from me about Germany, only about Germany how you can get information in Germany. Germany's a very tough country. We're working in Germany and it's very, very hard to get information. The Nordic countries are the best. The farther south the more tricky it gets. I will stop, but she started it. (laughing). Sorry.
>> PAMINDER JEET SINGH: I will try to respond to the problems and issues that have been raised rather than go that the speakers earlier have been said, but there are lots of problems.
First, the issue the question that was raised here, I think it's it's a bigger issue, it's like private public sector does not have money and they're inefficient and can't do it and wouldn't have money. This is a vicious cycle.
We keep on saying should somebody else do it and if they do, that sector would be less efficient and more con fueled. These activities are done by private public sector. They need to get the money.
If there are certain public function in one, but to ask the question, where is the money, I think the next step to ask the question is to general say, let's privatize it and let the information be sold as saying let them get out of it. Let's earn money or get in the partnership or people what can get out of it. It's out of the function, we need to get the money and let them get more taxes. It's a big issue, but I don't have that answer for that.
I think that's the big issue here. And yes, there is an issue to get access open. One of the last questions, credit cards help to make things more open or do they hinder openness? Jury is out and there are problems either side, but I still think public domain is the best way and should have government permission. There's not very many countries what this means is public officials, information is you can assume it has in a memo that is in the public interest.
Basically just to get a system of EU system, you can start out by saying this is Democratic matter and none of the information is commercial, possibility of when you book in a well most Asia countries, there is this framework in people once they're publicly funded with cop rights and it is coming out which is one of the countries or leverage which is to be modeled on very famous US bid in this regard.
Has been told about things done in that regard and ends in substitution but it will be a creeping effort and outputs should be privatized. And the core of that issue is something that needs to be covered in workshops and we need a public domain system and the proper coverage which is how to use or commercial position and have a different framework about how to protect the use and outside the framework to privatize it and protect it.
There should be models to protect land use information. It's government and they can come up with information and this guy could not be writes used and then you if the standards are open you don't need partnerships. The open standards are our partnerships. That's the best I don't want to get into too many deals with people and reuse I mean they have to if they get it, it should be openness is sometimes not enough management. It's the kind of Antonio asked what kind of group should provide the platform. It comes after open standards. Somebody needs to acquire a system. It's open and simply doesn't get reused. Who gets the platform is remain to be the question. I think there should be the question.
I think there should be money involved which enables the community to do but not make all the decision but a life touch framework is needed others yeah, that's all at this moment. Thank you.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Any response to any of that? Yes. Just briefly.
>> ANTONIO SARAVIA: Yes, I wanted to react. Regarding the difficulty to collect data, I stand corrected. Sort of down the road, but anyway, I think it's important for government that wants to get paid for this information to understand that they're going to create an addiction for this source that is going to have to go away later on, because I think, you know, the it's okay probably for some government to want to get some money now because it's a new sort of people want to try different thing, but I think overall this is data people paid for with their taxes, so it has to be free. It's going to be free everywhere, even if country that gets money out of it.
If people stop getting money it's going to be hard to stop that business. If you don't get the official standard like ISO or they still have a standard, right. Now day, nobody does that, you know, all the Internet standard organisation give it away for free, talking about the document. Now you talk to them and say you cannot compete with us. We're giving I felt away for three and you have all these people that comes from selling the stick. It's like they they're not they can do ant it. They started that 20 years ago and now they need the money. The standard should be free online and they cannot do it. So people have to watch for that sort of thing.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Any other responses to what you've heard.?
Move on to the next question about the panel and while they answer, if you can think from your point of view.
PSI used in Democratic and social potential, we would like short statements which focus on the following issue. Transparency, participation, improved accountability, public trust, visibility of political and social issues, openness, collaboration, accessibility, efficiency, access to larger education, understanding of cultural heritage.
>> PAMINDER JEET SINGH: Can you tell us I agree with all of us, so what is the question?
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Do you have any view on any of those issues and how
>> PAMINDER JEET SINGH: Okay. As I said, I believe that public sector information should be provided with all those aspects. What kind of things take care of those aspects. I could carry on with the copy right issue. I think it's dangerous for governments to get into once you start thinking, you can say there's money and can prophetize it and put licenses on it.
If it's a market business, it's difficult to investigate it and it you need to understand those laws and revolutions can be done but generally level and very difficult. You must have the mindset of this is very good and we want to keep it.
Okay. This is public information and it's a democracy and you can take it but the availability is limited and it's a resource. So somebody has to sign before you get this information.
We shouldn't get into the freedom of information is a commercial resource or commercially plentiful resource which can be modernized, et cetera, et cetera, and promote the should do that best. It should be used for collection areas I'm not asking it shouldn't be used for this. Freedom of release should have protection against abuse, medical misrepresenting something, I think that should get misuse from the confidentiality otherwise it will be public strong misuse abuse framework.
The second part is there has to be enabling aspect of it. Reuse small businesses who can make a business out of selling that information, they are many many who can set out a platform and help a citizen, but in four countries government has the responsibility. It's not just give moral and that's more money we need to.
The model is good. But the schedule, it gives the loss framework and every couple of weeks and it keeps the public interest shown around the world, but doesn't intertwine too much so the software committees aware but not so much control by the government.
These are the platforms where you get information in manners that are for the public interest. These are the two issues which I would like us going towards.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: The context of what we're discussing is in the name of democracy and the value of public sector information in supporting and enabling democracy. We're talking about what do you have to do the get the public sector information reuse to support the Democratic processes. Rolf?
>> ROLF NORDQVIST: I would like to take the chance to talk about the Democratic process and the commercial process and I would like to start saying the fundament or the Democratic use and the commercial reuse is the openness and transparency. You always have to start with openness and transparency to have this fundament. I live in a country that 1766 started with this.
So our law about transparency was about 1766. Our law says if the information is not credit, it's free. That means it's free if it's not secret so you have to do it secret or you shouldn't use it.
So it's free information and now we're getting a new law that says information should be delivered in a digital form if it's not inappropriate. So you could always ask for the information, any information, in a digital form. I think this is a very good opportunity to go further for reuse. But the fundament is only the same fundament that means reuse. So suddenly when you go to different stages, we go different ways.
We are not working with E democracy, we're not working with eGovernment, we're not working with E governance, we're working with commercial reuse and commercial reuse is the same thing as any other product that you sell on the market. Thinking marketing terms. What are we aiming for? We're aiming for high revenue. We're aiming for high profit, and we are aiming for return on our capital or investment.
That's very, very important to understand and we need the government people to understand what we are doing. We are not a Democratic institution. We're a government institution. I would not speak about the institution. It's your fee, so you won't get the word from me. Okay.
>> ANTONIO SARAVIA: Well, I said at the beginning, we're talking about two aspects. The Democratic aspect of the PSI as well as the Democratic aspect. It's take to talk at the democratic aspect.
We talk about just policy as well as participation. Okay. Transparency in the sense that in the support from the beginning, we tried to create the culture of transparency inside the administration. We haven't been asked advance what the people in the administration in order to promote culture of openness. When you're expecting almost from scratch, because several years ago the owner of the data, the administration, sealed ourselves out of the data, okay? No.
Now, you have to explain to data that it's a most of the it's a right to see the data for no commercial or commercial purposes. It's a must. But it's a cultural change important. So one year fighting with this culture change, cultural change.
We start a web site with many other information in order to try to help administration to train people about that. And we open a catalog with more than 450 data set with all administration, open to everybody and we stop talking and associated with secret platforms in order to hear what they wanted to hear. They expect it to happen about participation and transparency.
We have time to collect the information and transmit it, so we're relevant in fact because we are working now in a new low, ultimate transparency and access public information. We hope this new low that is coming soon will help us to show the barrier of the PSI. We're working with the civil society. We encourage the partnership with some civil platforms in order to work together, okay?
And, of course, this is link, from link to open government database. Let's say it's not the same, but for some people it's the same. It's only one part of the open government.
Okay. We're working to we are hearing what they are saying. We are working in social works. We have about a lot of inputs, common, we try to collect the information associated. It's not the city of course but we need to hear them to get better things in the future.
We have a lot where people can write everything and we have here. So let's say participation and transparency, we are sighting. But it's only two years' time. We need more time to do it. It is clear, and we recognize, how important is PSI in this democratic aspect. We expect the poem ton other side, the citizens, we maybe trust more in the administration.
I don't know in our countries, but sometimes in Spain you can see the people don't trust in the administration. Okay. That is I'm not sure the nation trust. We have regular pay as well. The administration is doing. They have a new web site open to six sense and they are practicing. This is getting tense.
>> ANNE FITZGERALD: Thank you. I actually think the shift towards focusing on PSI access to PSI, PSI reuse what, we have to understand is that this is really it's driven by the changes in technology, so window 2, window 3. It's already beginning to have a fundamental impact on the interface between government and citizens. So we hear about openness, transparency, but another important thing is this enables participatory democracy. We ended up with an election and a home Parliament, no majority. Everybody is required to vote and you get find if you don't.
So people take an interest in what the government is doing and they're interested. You can see there's a lot of they're driven by community groups or not for profit organisations or involving collaboration between government and academic or private sector.
In Australia, open Australia which takes all the Parliamentary documents and debates and so forth, combines information in a way no government agency will do so we can keep a track what government is doing, that's an entirely driven by citizens, that make it entirely available on the web site. We can see projects that involve real collaboration between government and nongovernment parties in a way that was not happening before. A lot of this is inspired by projects and philosophy that was discussed by Beth Novak.
We have public sector documents and patent documents. The patent system is essential being run in a collaborative way, so the community at large is asked to comment on whether patent applications describe technology which really does deserve a pattern. So we're asked to describe the use of technology in a way to change the way government is actually administered. We can also see importantly the access to publicly funded academic research.
One of the projects I've been involved in called open access to knowledge law, or OAC law, this is reworking the interface between government, and I guess, the publishing industry. So working up a legal framework to enable academic publications to be made available for free and open access download unabridged common licenses from university open access repositories while still being able to not challenge the continued viability of the publishing industry, personal in our country, this is my final point and we could go on and own, cultural heritage is one of the areas which is obviously very important, so far we haven't mentioned the importance of using, I guess, the Web technologies that are available so that indigenous groups can control the identification and use that's made of the cultural knowledge. That's going to be another important thing to see in this area. Thank you.
>> WALTRAULT RITTER: That's very interrogatory. In Hong Kong, we have to say that we're not a fully fledged democracy yet. We have ear a two system policy yet between China and there's limited participation of policy making.
However, in the past years there's a discussion about open access to information has really increased and early this year the ombudsman has released a report of how happy the public is with current code of access to information.
The ombudsman said many areas need to be improved and very often the officers in the 91 agencies are not aware of the code to access to information.
The constitutional affairs bureau of which the code to access to information is administered as started to make to offer administer training for government officials to understand what happens if a citizen wants to know something.
And I also have some figures here from 1995 when the code came into access and until 1995 there railroad around 20,000 requests so that's actually not very much for a 15 year period it's like 1,300 requests per year and 95 were answered in satisfaction to the inquire re.
We don't know if they're individual requests for a piece of information or is it relating to a more complex issue. We don't have detail about the name of the request under this court, information.
But in the report from the government agency to the ombudsman, one of the main reason to improve is more government transparency and accountability. This also has to do with public trust so people can see yes, we are not what we are doing is easing to follow and easy to see in the document.
I always want to mention in terms of collaboration and accessibility, there are a few small project in education and heritage, but these are really very small exploratory projects at the moment. For citizens to know what is available isn't easy. At the moment there's no comprehensive asset region the government said where you can see on the environment department you have those databases and this kind of information available. So but that is something that will happen. And so I think this in all the PSI policies, we also know that establishes what is there, creating the asset list is one of the first steps and that is where we are at the moment.
Then at the the point that Anne mentioned about the academic knowledge repository, there's a separates initiative led by the university professors what want access to government page and government funded research, but there's it's still quite a long way to get this through in Hong Kong because the university grants committee is leaves this to the individual professor and no policy valid for all universities.
In the feature of archives, I think this is an area where a lot could be done. As I mentioned there are very, very few initiatives going on.
I'm trying to convince some of the organisations to do what we have in European, like European dot EU where Mr. Of the assets are not digitalized. So it's quite an effort to see what content can we digitize and make available.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Thank you. I think if we can sum that up in the Democratic social area, it is clear that the public sector information is important. There's no doubt about that. Because where you have a government which permits that sort of Democratic process to work, if that information is made available, the society is, in fact, using it.
To assist that process, the technological is helping because it's make it easier once it's become electronic to be able to put it up there without very much extra cost. In putting that information up, you then have to enable the society to be able to use it for their democratic process and social purposes freely and easily, and quite rightly, as was said, one has to guard against malicious use of that data and how you actually deal with that aspect.
Any response remotely? No.
>> Liesyl has a question or a point. I heard a civil society's involvement in transparency. They've actually been doing a lot of work with respect to promoting transparency and accountability of government information, particularly in the development and effectiveness and all that and how government resources are being spent with respect to that.
I was wondering, there's a lot of organisations, like the transparency IAT, and The World Bank who recently did really good mapping, finished a product where they put all the information on EFLus, and now there's a lot of information that this is possible and you can't find that data, 12 interns did it in six weeks, I think it was, and now you have geographic location information on EFL us and 12,000 locations in South Africa and all these other places, so I'm just thinking, I think, sometimes even ourselves that serve a society to kind specifically in that area. Because of our successful despite a lot of criticism, The World Bank is looking at investigating that in investigating their reporting so it doesn't have to be done again.
So I just was wondering about society's role and investment in terms of the use of the data.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Start with Waltraut.
>> WALTRAULT RITTER: Yeah. I think society has a strong undercurrent of getting this right first and not focus on the opportunity. Then this dialogue between the civil society and government is immediately contested. It's difficult to chief something and that is the case in Hong Kong, I don't know about other countries.
Because it is always focusing on we want this instead of saying, okay, why don't we tryout the I mean the form of dialogue, I think, needs to be smarter between civil society and civil society to just to collaborate and co create new services and better information in what is the interest in both sides.
For instance, the environmental one, the social welfare, area. Too often, I think, this dialogue is very fierce and not collaborative. That's my impression.
>> ANNE FITZGERALD: I don't think this is the case in Australia. Obviously, there's a role between civil society. The political law and trying to get government to shift in certain areas or go the very traditional heritage kind of area. If I just give you one example, people say how can this work, civil society collaborating with government? Our national library has digitalized all the newspapers, but it's not that good. The way it translates across to a readable file has quite a few mistakes.
For an individual or team or library, it would make it possible for any member of the public, come to site and registered and don't need to give them anything else other than that. And you can come in and create in of the text yourself or you might know about the events or places in the newspaper articles.
So many thousands of people become addicted to this. As a result much of the historical record is hasn't been corrected entirely on a volunteer basis. If you go in and detail it it's amazingly addictive. They found some people put in crazy comments or whatever and that you academic what text is being corrected? I you've harnessed people out there who become addicted to these kind of things.
You never know what interest there are in the community that you can become tapped into. The government needs community there to help them round out our societies.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Antonio?
>> ANTONIO SARAVIA: Only one minute? You mention that in the case of paying, through a portal we try to we created a community that we expect is a community of influential. So the society, to listen and get the cooperation is the biggest thing. Of course, the point is to try to find out and to start communication, effective mechanism and communication. In our case we've let's say we target all of the the community is specifically interested in PSI subject.
We tried to identify that feel in the civil society interested in that subject, and we try to okay. Using the social networks, using blogs and web sites, we have an active community.
It's a very, very small target, but the an influential candidate to listen. So I think it's quite a business to say, I'm going to listen to society in general and they recommended to listen, to try to set back in differential times. And you say you have a target and we looked for sample in Spain.
The most important paper in Spain we get two that are dedicated to PSI on the bottom of the democratic, what, how we do it because of the influence of the newspaper, okay. That is the way good way to end.
>> ROLF NORDQVIST: I see two roles of civil society in the framework you're talking and. One is do the kind of innovation this particular role did. Government may not have a good idea and you can do a pilot and demonstrate some possible in a manner and take it to the government. Then they mainstream I felt. One is to innovation. Second, the kind of which we are talking and that it has to be a partnership.
You have communities, LNGs doing some work and they got on the role of civil societies at the hill. One of them organized, the NGSs which could probably partner and how you have to punish what it is styles and they're managing this to other framework after our civil society.
And going back to this problem of typical acquisition stance of NGOs and how does it go when we're looking for logical operations between public sector community and NGOs and how we have time together and I'm I want to storm in that sense, change doesn't work with government. We do committee projects with governments and do work on software project and organise around applications and we do very option KC and the global left.
So let's be back it's not, because there is a strong political role of civil society anticipate it doesn't go away because they're getting into partnership. Seeking apart there will be others which will be on a more cooperative role and it could do both those things together.
>> I'm from Pakistan and I'm Al Jamil. We have a higher level of things, I'm from a developing country, there's basic information we can't even get. So newspapers the library example that was given. It seems to me if taxpayer money is being used to collect data or create information, the government is at the very least a trustee. If a beneficiary of the public wants to obtain the information, the government to monetize from that seems strange.
The right to have the access, that's what everybody is focusing on, there's a situation from developing countries, I may have a right to access that information. Give you an example, Gazettes published by the government, but when you go to publication offices in developing countries and say can I get a copy and willing to pay a fee, the answer is we haven't had the money to print this yet it hasn't come to us or there's a store where nonsequential bundles are kept if you pay me money, I want to make the distinction, do you have the right to access this? They say yes, of course, the right to have it available? It's available but not accessible.
In the context of the Internet, that is a game changer. It won't cost the government any money, to put on the web site. In any country for the first time ever they started putting up draft legislation of the national assembly. We still don't have the gazettes, the Parliamentary record of debates and they're supposed to be public document. When transparency, The World Bank, DSI and others, push to get the right to make this available, I think they need to go one step further and say the right to make it available is there but is it available? A what can we do to make sure it's communicated through the Internet? I think that's a fantastic way and I want to support that.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Thank you very much for that comment. Any other comments? Still nothing remotely?
Can we move to the next question for the panel Paminder. Now, about the economic benefit of PSI. So how do we measure it? How do you know it's happening? This is the area I would just like the ask briefly each member of the panel?
>> PAMINDER JEET SINGH: I wrote a brief on this, the democratic thing is really not my area, but I must say that governments spend money of information for public interest, that's the intention first of all.
At the first step would be of public interest. It would also constitute public interest and it would it should actually be used and there is no information and public activity. If they use it and they should say it should be freely used and which information is not to be reused for what purpose? The authority it could be reused.
Now, under what thing they should manage or given, but learn making it so anybody's managing it, so as Doug was taking, it should be so are they going to manage that information. The fireworks of what is managed is contested.
I think it should be a government, and it should be managed. Even a created governance, first you're I think it's absolute public domain I think the difference of managing comments and how governance and it should be managed for the public.
The framework of any reason it should not be shared, they should be they shouldn't be abused, misused or encouragement. Criminal issues, government sent I think the freedom of shouldn't be abused and misused and not it should be government used. Next it should be afforded and partnerships and to economic place.
It should be it correct it should be very transparency. You should know that it's so the public interest is best served to make it equally even if it not available but more accessible better these are the principles of managing departments and it should be managed. How do you measure whether it has been made or has been made of such information? As well as it's not a big market and not much is happening so be able to answer the question.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Okay.
>> ROLF NORDQVIST: First, I say the public information has enormous value, everybody knows that but very few takes that into their business. I would like to say that if you distribute information from an authority, you would say have sudden revenue, but all the report say if you have all revenue from private companies, you have five to ten more revenue.
And people wonder, could that be true? That is true because of what is actually companies like us do, we add something to this information. People think that the most important thing we do is add other kinds of information to it, but it's not true. We add customized solution. We had 500 sellers who sell the information and make it available on the market.
You can't sell information if you don't market it, if you don't have a good run or any sellers. If you want more useful information use the private companies. If you talk to authorities, they have no marketing people. They don't want to market it. They don't have no selling people. They don't want to sell it. They just want to have one solution to sell to the market.
Everyone should be treated equally. And that's the way of the democratic process. It's definitely not part of the private process. So what I would like toll say is that you have to give this market the possibility to work. That means authority, no competition with the authorities on the market. That means we would like to pay the price that's equal to the cost of the authority has. We would like to have fair conditions, that mean less copy right restrictions as possible.
And I would like to have a fair treatment that means that the people in the authorities really respect the market that we welcome.
And now to your question, I think it's a very easy question, Chris. The market surveys done every day in every market. It's just do the same. Go out to the market and ask for the amount of information that is sold and get the market size and buy from different information and so on, don't try to measure the sale of information in the authority because sometimes the authority gives the information away and the revenue is zero. Sometimes they take small amounts of cost based price and then the amount is so high, sometimes they would like to take more and then the price is so high. So I think the best thing of doing is it asking the companies doing a normal survey and that's see easy.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Antonio.
>> ANTONIO SARAVIA: Okay. About potential to do the math. Well, I think it is maybe easy, but we have to do it, okay, because it is not done yet. At least in Spain we have a little we have certain numbers of public sector information. For instance, in Spain the provides information, it's noted that his activity, almost 8 something million Euros are cost, it's not selling product but save money.
That is on overexample. We have to establish but actually.
The past presidency of the union, the last semester a new system in Europe and now the European Commission has four working groups that caused to a study and propose a new market model from PSI. We're working from Spain and working in these groups, Tivoli, and we start to have results soon.
Another number, if we talk about the industry in Spain is 10 percent of GDP. The contribution of the PSI, how much is it now, how much can be. In the framework of the portal project, we are going to run, we're linked to the European Union. In order to set up the magic for sale, we expect use the model union but to touch on that, the metrics specifically and we are working as well on the user sector in Spain.
Because that is not clear. You cannot go outside and say, please, all the users actually the re users at least in paper doesn't. Okay?
But where we going to study at? We have more people using information that you don't and there is more business you have not identified yet. The point is where are you going to studied. The user market in Spain and another two identifiable. All the business is there.
I do say, in the public eye it's in the market sector where the value is. How many people is working? How many jobs? And we expect to have this study in March of next year. Okay. We show them something.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Anne.
>> ANNE FITZGERALD: I agree with the points so far. A lot of economic research has been done from a theoretical perspective and recently in individual countries looking to try to find specific benefits, economic benefits of PSI reuse.
But I think it's also important not to lose sight of the fact that benefits are indirect. Information, as the cliché goes, obtain value through use. Benefit is not through the sale and repackaging of industries.
One of the best value in Australia is we have a long held question of practice of making public sector information available for free, publicly accessible and more re sent times for value or access on the information. This is information gathered by mining companies, mineral prospecting companies. In Australia the state I live in we have very little heavy industry, it's doctor we derive our wealth from digging dirt and various forms out of the ground and exporting it in ships to Japan and Korea in the form of coal or oar.
The real value in our country comes from mineral exports. For us it's more valuable to give out that information, information that's been obtained by prospectors and explorers on the Web. I felt requires people with good geological and analytical skills to find that, so where should international mining companies spent their exploration dollars to try to uncover new discoveries, so that analysis is likely to be done by someone sitting in central Brisbane. So the value we get from the information is that someone out there, an analyst is more likely to uncover the next potential site to go and actually drill holes on Australian territory.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Okay. Thank you. Waltraut.
>> WALTRAULT RITTER: I think this is for countries outside EU.
In some countries it's very difficult to see the information market. What is actually the digital content market in a particular industry? In fact, in most of the Asian countries it's hard to get information? Who are the countries in these industry? Are these western companies or independent small companies? Who's the potential buyer or user of government information? I have not seen any in depth study of an Asian company so far and when I look at European studies, I think there are few convincing cases that make an Asian government say we need to jump on PSI because it's a huge economic potential.
Because as Anne said, the information has no value unless it is used. So where are the convincing good examples for SME to see how new services can be created, and what can we do if we had this statistic or geo space information? That we can use to create new services. I have done a little bit of research in Hong Kong and Singapore to see where are their small information service sliders what are creating innovative new services using publicly available information and so forth most of them are using information on the Web but not derived from governments in Asia.
So I think for many countries the question is to ups what are the basis of our information? What are the buyers and sellers? What is the size of the market? What is local knowledge that can be hold or exported to other places?
I think that's the research that can be done in the field. You mentioned India is not a big market but I think it is a huge market and just a do you have also the people who do this information, the information professionals, the information experts who are able to explore these assets? I think that is a huge potential in India. I know for instance somebody using public information and a new service for public tender information and put that into one space and that is now available for everybody in India who wants to see what kind of tender is there, that's one example of innovative service and that's a huge potential.
We can only understand if we have good examples and see examples outside the city. Thank you.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Thank you. Do you want to take the points from Frederic? She's raised some points come income remotely.
>> Frederic Donck, a researcher at the university of technology. He said with respect to Chris' point earlier, there are two at the moment; that which is the right to access, that is the feed of information and No. two, the right to reuse the private sector for value added. She just wanted to recommend we shouldn't confuse the two. She asked if Rolf would give reference to reports mentioned earlier.
And she spoke about the EU PSI directive which deals with PSI allows licenses and fees for the developing world. She also said feeder information is important because you need the feeder information as democratic right before you talk about economic right such as PSI.
She also mentioned about the private sector adding five times revenue that rather than the private sector doing relevant private sector doing the marketing themselves.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Thank you. Just on the point of addresses to me about clarification of the earlier questions, there it's my fault, I didn't make it clear enough. The first question was about the democratic right. It's assumed you had access and it was available.
So it was making the assumption that once the citizen or society has access to it, do they actually have the right to reuse it because many freedom and information acts around the world allows you to receive it but can't do anything with it, necessarily.
That was the distinction. There was one to Rolf about the name of the report. Do you have the name of the Rolf?
>> ROLF NORDQVIST: Not on me.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: We'll document that and include that. The LSU on the PSI directive, what's contained on it. It comes with an consensus position of the European Union, one the often driven down below the common denominator and have to allow subsidiaries to work and you have to have a directive which enables member states within the European Union to be able to operate with their current practices while you actually then try to transpose the culture to move it on to the next stage and as was mentioned earlier on, the European Commission at the moment is actually opened to public consultation was opened last week and closes at the end of November, and it's asking everybody who reuses PSI whether they be in Europe or elsewhere, if they're using European PSI to feed in their input to what should next happen to the directive.
Is there any comment anybody on the panel would like to make to Frederic? Hello? Okay. Thank you, Frederic for that? Yes?
>> ANNE FITZGERALD: Yes, picking up Frederic's comment? If a lot of information laws underpinning a system for PSI access and reuse, we've seen around the world working or strengthening FLI laws, strengthening the right for members of the community to get access to materials held by the government, but as well as having that, I see that's a fundamental or underping of PSI access and reuse system. They may need to lead to final set of questions, before we finish up a question, build up what we call the surface structure the principle and right after the government, the proactive or pushing out or making available of materials by government agency so every time an individual or company wants to access some data, it doesn't have to come and specifically ask forward slash it.
There needs to be a much more proactive receive leaf tragedy which I guess is pretty fundamentally incorporated into the thinking underping the PSI directive anyway.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Yes.
>> It's more that citizenship rights, which is it's more all kinds of use collect your benefits and this should clearly be recognized.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Thank you. We're towards the end and running out of time, I would like to ask each of the panel members quickly what two things. One is what's the most important future challenge in their view to address with regards to public sector information reuse.
>> PAMINDER JEET SINGH: I think in which the challenge lies is pretty clear and practical. One is the framework of managing these comments where they should be proper framework or the framework manages use.
I think if you keep on increasing the property knowledge even in the proper sector as it is happening in countries, now we finally lead to less use of public sector information. From a public sector you going to sit together and from find out how this information should be this should be managed, something very, very public, and what they need to think about.
Second is think about major partnerships. The moment we talk about reuse, I felt talks with partnerships and if you with the worldwide community partners and partnerships with the private sectors.
Retain documents and retain on how you partnerships and once you start them, how do you manage them. It's easy to say getting partnership NGO and the problem is government sector is not set up to run on a sustained matter. They can do it on a short sector and they want there should be detailed but being set right. Thank you.
>> ROLF NORDQVIST: Two points, one is character, one is wit. If you get close to authorities you need to find a win win situation. We are not only demanding things and information, they should get something back.
And, of course, we also have to understand each other's culture. That mean we have to understand how government is working and they have to understand how private companies is working. And we need to have much, much, much sharper session in each one. The PSI directive has to be conformed into something we can use when we go to authority and say we can see what information you have. You need to show up and we need a price we can live with us.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Thank you. Antonio?
>> ANTONIO SARAVIA: Well, between that, I think the challenge in spine is to develop a PSI. We need pretty tickets, we need to eliminate happening else. Splice standard price in.
We hope that the cover the change of the there is the directive, we expect that will help. In Spain we're working on access to public information, access to public information. We want to get the maximum political command, okay. The leadership, as much as possible, that's important. As well to extend the government to local government, to, let's say, regular champions to make the knowledge.
If we talk about interoperability and we want to talk about let's say interoperability is it, okay.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Anne.
>> ANNE FITZGERALD: Okay. I would really suggest we need to stop working more start working more effectively to develop international policy principles on access to public sector information and publicly funded research out puts. I would suggest looking at the recommendation it is OECD produced annexed to the sole information on the future of the Internet economy in 2008. I think we need to establish effective international cooperation that has actually been in place in many cases for more than 50 years.
Collaborative arrangements regarding sharing to access of research data under international research. I think we need to look at OECD recommendations and see if we can develop that not just a set of principles that guard the OECD countries, but countries around the world.
There are many examples of many country and other countries of things that actually worked. Regardless of the skepticism, in Australia, all governments do use credit common licenses for distribution and release of a very wide range of materials that we would call would come within a scope of what we came statistical data to cultural materials.
We've shown you how to make that work and we've worked through the legal issues to show you it's sustainable workable system. Thanks.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Thank you.
>> WALTRAULT RITTER: Okay. I think for countries at the beginning of the PSI journey, I would think it is very important to look at their overall information policy in the country and in most countries you fight bits and pieces at the moment. A little bit of eGovernment, a little bit of copy right policy, and information, resource management is very scattered, some have it and others don't.
There's few companies that have comprehensive policy on all information and how it can contribute to innovation and new services. And if you think about it, knowledge is an unlimited resource. That's what Information Society is about since 1950s. It's prices how many restrictions there are and hurdles with most government. It seems to be a content issue to create an information technology that takes into account aspect and power and capacity building for nations.
There's still a long way to go and for many countries in Asia, it's very early days and we are following with attention what's happening in Europe and we'll see.
>> CHRISTOPHER CORBIN: Just to sum up briefly because we've run out of time, I hope we haven't given you the belief this is an easy task. This is a long task.
In the European Union, for example, the first principles, policy principles on public safety in 199, pre the Internet. They became law in 2003. They've had a law and we're working on it. We have a framework but we're far away from achieving it.
To move things forward, we have to achieve some sort of cultural change and that's where this working together comes in, whether it's society of NGOs or whether they're commercial reuses to try to bring forward the stakeholders. There's much more and still big need for good practice.
Real examples of PSIE's documented and made available and once that becomes available for those countries in the world that I'm opening up the PSI and develop their economy, not much with the public sector, maybe those would be useful and starting at the beginning.
It's not an easy task and raises the issue of sustainability which comes up intermittently. How do you keep this going? Because we have creatable change and lots of country quite often. One minute you're going down one track, an election and you switch and going down another track. How do you keep the public sector employees aware of why with ear doing this? How do you encourage society this data is theirs, use it for improving your life? These are all ongoing issues and difficult.
So I think the only message I would like to say is it's not a quick win. It's a long task. In Europe, the United States and other areas, there's a lot of work going on to try to achieve even in those countries. Try to go to a conduct that doesn't have anything at all to start with.
One thing is clear from all this, bearing in mind we're in the European Union started, the Internet has made other technologies have made a difference what was quite difficult. And even further, the technology developed to such an extent it is affordable and society can have access to it anticipate use it and it's becoming not a technological or network issue, how do you change culture.
I would like to thank the panel members, first of all, and for coming from far away to join in the short session here. Thank you very much.
And those of you in the audience or who raised various points and those remotely who have been watching and raised points. Thank you to everybody and show appreciation in the normal way, please.
(Applause).