1. Hello, my name is Dirk van Barneveld
Hello, my name is Dirk van Barneveld. I am a senior policy advisor at the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment. As such open data policy is one of my major concerns. Today I want to tell you something about the Dutch open data policy. I’ll be very brief on our general open data policies, because I believe them to be quite similar to other countries. I do elaborate a bit more about our experiences in opening data up.

2. The Dutch open data policy is mainly driven by the wish to make government more transparent and to stimulate innovation. Nothing special there, but I do want to stress we firmly believe in the potential of open data.

3. The Ministery of the Interior is responsible for the Dutch open data policy and has defined open data as all data generated within public services, paid for by public means and suitable to make publicly available

4. Preferably these data conform to open standards and of course they should be machine readable.

5. The ministry also developed some guidelines as how to make these data available. They should be downloadable…

6. … should be free when distributed via the internet…

7. … and should be free of any restrictions
… and should be free of any restrictions. Right now you are looking to the preferred license agreement. It’s empty.

8. In October 2011 my minister Melanie Schultz promised the minister of Economic Affairs to open all data within her ministry. To make sure, she isn’t smoking but holding a USB stick containing topographical data which became available for free in 2012.

9. Mrs. Schultz was bold enough to announce a deadline and it really was a day full of joy and happy faces.

10. The next day however… realization set in: what have I done?

11. She promised to open up not just the data of the ministery…

12. … but also of all the agencies within the responsability of the ministry of which there are many. Here you can see but just a few of them: the Cadastre, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institution, Air Traffic Control and so on.

13. Well, one of the priviliges of a minister: you can put your people to work and that’s what she did and me and my colleagues are still on it. Let me share some of our experiences so far.

14. First, open data might be free for the public, but the data itself don’t come into existence for free. Right now some of our agencies recover their costs in part by selling data. If we want them to give their data away for free, they need compensation in order the maintain their activities. In times of severe budget cuts its hard to explain why you increase your spending on open data while cutting back on social security.

15. And what does making data available exactly mean
And what does making data available exactly mean. Its fairly easy and cheap to deliver more or less static data, but that’s not true of sensor data producing high volumes of data every single second. Should we make those data available and at what costs? For businesses certainty about data availability is key. But can and should government offer service level agreements on their datastreams?

16. Open data is all about commercial reuse
Open data is all about commercial reuse. The reuse of open data should provide new market opportunities.

17. But for some companies open data is nothing less than an upheaval of their business model. These companies can become quite angry…

18. … and do takes us to court seeking tens of millions of Euros in damages.

19. Privacy is another big problem
Privacy is another big problem. Because of technological advances and tightening privacy regulation more and more data can be seen as privacy sensitive. We strongly believe that data protection and open data policies are on a collision course or maybe and probably more accurately are already conflicting. I think this tension is also present in the relevant European directives and regulations. Unfortunately, I do not think this very important and difficult issue is adequately addressed neither on the national nor on the European level, but I do hope I will be proven wrong very soon.

20. So… should you feel depressed by now. Please don’t
So… should you feel depressed by now? Please don’t. My goal was to point out that in practice open data isn’t as easy as putting some data on a server, but these problems shouldn’t make us wait and see. They should make us push harder and they do…

21. Available datasets in the Netherlands have soared in recent years and many more are on their way.

22. In typical Dutch fashion all parties involved are actively engaged in discussion how to solve the problems I mentioned and …

23. … we set up an open data innovation network in which public bodies, private companies and eductional institutions work closely together to make open data work within specific sectors. I do believe it will take some more time to solve all problems, but I am also confident we will find a good solution. Because in the end I really need to keep…

24. …. this lady smiling. And of course, we do need to make our government more transparent and yes, we do need to make our economy more innovative. We simply can’t afford not to open up our data.

25. And with that I would like to end my introductory presentation.