Forward-Looking, Visionary Approaches for Public Sector Information Sharing and Utilisation

 

Call For Participation

Open data provides an unprecedented opportunity for innovation around transparent, evidence-based decision making, public engagement and trust. Just as importantly, it also facilitates more efficient government with each department or agency better able to reuse data collected and managed by their colleagues (perhaps very distant colleagues). Public sector information (PSI) may be offered as ”open data” in many forms and through different media: from simple datasets describing traffic or unemployment, to Web services linking and mashing information from different sources, to interactive visualisation of complex phenomena, to citizen-based data gathering and transmission. Through these different channels, new information is made available across the public and private sectors, to scientists, citizens and enterprises, all of whom are then able to benefit from each other’s activities in a growing network effect.

That’s the promise. So what’s the reality? With many initiatives already in place, what innovations have we seen both in terms of curation and publishing, and in terms of data reusage? What are the effiency gains? How much of the promise of open data is being fulfilled? Are expectations being met? If so, how? If not, is it the expectations or the implementation that is wrong?

Expected Outcomes

The workshop report will show examples where innovation in the curation, publication and reuse of public sector information has and has not met the promise of open data, particularly in terms of improvements in operational efficiency. Where and how has this been achieved? Where initiatives that have fallen short of their promise, what might be the reasons for that? The expected outcome of the workshop will be helpful to EU Member States working to implement the revised PSI Directive.

As with all Share-PSI 2.0 workshops (a total of five are planned), this workshop will provide input to the W3C Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group, helping to maximise the impact of open data efforts around the world.

Participation

The Share-PSI 2.0 partners invite short position papers describing initiatives undertaken to make public sector information available and the impact that these efforts have had. These should not be academic papers but descriptions of the discussion or presentation you would like to offer. Each organisation or individual wishing to participate must submit a position paper explaining their interest in the workshop by the deadline. The intention is to make sure that participants have an active interest in the area, and that the workshop will benefit from their presence. Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • uses of open data within government for innovation and efficiency proving the value of open data within the public sector;
  • improvement in public service delivery;
  • examples of open data utilisation for policy making purposes;
  • visionary ideas on open data utilisation within society and policy modelling;
  • new approaches for public sector information processing and visualisation;
  • open data and citizen participation in information gathering / crowdsourcing;
  • the open data feedback loop — communication between organizations that publish data and users of the data;
  • collaboration between different communities.

Submissions will be reviewed by the programme committee within 2 weeks of the submission deadline.

Participation is free, however, there will be a charge to cover catering costs. There is no funding to support participants’ travel and accommodation expenses.

Submission Guidelines

Papers should be a maximum of 5 pages long and should be submitted in a non-proprietary format (HTML, PDF, ePub etc.) via e-mail to group-share-psi@w3.org. Please include an abstract of the paper in your e-mail. Note that the archive for this e-mail address is visible to Share-PSI partners and W3C Team only.

Submissions by more than one author are welcome; however only the coordinating author (as indicated in the submission) of the selected paper will be invited to take part in the Share-PSI workshop. Additional authors will be able to attend the workshop only if space allows. All selected contributions and associated slides will be published in the Share-PSI 2.0 Web site after the announcement of results.

Venue

This, the 1st Share-PSI 2.0 workshop, will be hosted by the University of the Aegean on the island of Samos, Greece, and in conjuction with the 5th Samos Summit on ICT-enabled Governance,  to , 2014.