International Forum on Access to Culture and Knowledge in the Digital Era – Organization and Action (FCForum)
The is an international arena in wich to build and coordinate action around issues related to free/libre culture and access to knowledge.The FCForum brings together key organizations and active voices in the spheres of free/libre culture and knowledge, and provides a meeting point where we can find answers to the pressing questions behind the current paradigm shift.
Against the powerful lobbies of the copyright industries, the FCForum is a space for the construction of proposals arising from civil society in order to strengthen citizen’s positions in the debate around the creation and distribution of art, culture and knowledge in the digital era.
28. to 31. October 2010, Barcelona, Spain
http://2010.fcforum.net/
Topics
I am happy to participate this year and I am very delighted to be able to contribute with a short presentation in the Working group: Open Public Sector Information
- Regional Initiatives of PSI Re-use: the Piedmont Experience: Raimondo Iemma
- Open PSI Initiatives: Focus on Europe: Daniel Dietrich
- Current Challenges and Opportunities of PSI Re-use in a Legal Perspective: Marc de Vries
- Fears, Risks, Challenges and Opportunities in the Digitization of Cultural Collections: Monika Hagedorn-Saupe
- Interfaces Between Intellectual Property and Cultural Public Sector Information: Raquel Xalabarder
The information held by the public sector (PSI) can be perceived as a huge gold mine containing information, data and content. Public bodies or bodies supported by public funds acquire, organize and use information related to their activities while working on their institutional tasks; like other public bodies they generate information through their activities. There are good reasons not to miss the opportunities offered by the PSI: not only because tax-payers have already paid for obtaining the same data selection, collection or generation service; but also because the creation or improvement of services resulting from the data generation or aggregation can be encouraged by making available decentralized choices identifying innovative ways to use PSI.
Given the ever growing amount of information we come into contact with everyday in the digital era we are living in, the appropriate exploitation of public data potential may offer profitable (yet mostly unexplored) market opportunities. Additionally, the availability of PSI would provide a strong contribution to a more democratic participation process, by making citizens truly aware of the public reality around them and bringing more transparency to the actions and choices of decision-makers.
This panel will approach and discuss the different legal, technological and factual challenges that lie in the field of Open Public Sector Information; not only in terms of PSI availability, but in terms of PSI re-use as well. Discussing the various European PSI initiatives at both national and local scale (e.g. data.gov.uk, the UK Government PSI repository; dati.piemonte.it, the recent PSI database launched in Italy by Regione Piemonte), shall provide a useful starting point for thinking about what has/has not been done so far; what could have been done better; and what should be done in order to make such valuable and abundant information widely available to entities and citizens, and then re-usable for commercial or non-commercial purposes.
