FINISHED TRANSCRIPT

EIGHTH INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM
BALI
BUILDING BRIDGES ENHANCING MULTI‑STAKEHOLDER COOPERATION FOR GROWTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
22 OCTOBER 2013

11:00 a.m.
SESSION 303

INTERNET GOVERNANCE AND OPEN DATA GOVERNMENT INITIATIVES

(Skype connection issues)

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>> Remember we have cooperative institutional arrangements, have long existed in specific areas.

We request see there in science library organizations such as co‑data.

In geo data we have the gOS project.

We have a lot of information apolar treaty.

We can carry a, statistical, meet your logical, but they seem to relate to specific areas, generally data produced and managed by government.

Since the mid 2000s, we have had numerous boards and governments have actually taken the step of issuing open government data policies and statements of principles.

Generally it rate the value of open data, underline the principles relate to the use and reuse, and almost always seek to establish a default position, that open data should be open and accessible to the public under transparent, nondiscriminatory conditions, and conditions conducive to reuse of the data.

This kind of key principle you can see emerging is stated in open data government policies, is that legal rights in government information must be exercised in a manner consistent with and supports the open accessibility and reusability of the data.

So it's not enough for it just to be made available so you can read it, but you should be able to do something, reuse the data, analyze it, create some new data sets from it.

Particularly where public sector information is protected by copyright, most countries in the world have copyright applied to what we would broadly call data or PSI, public sector information, even stuff that actually consists of data in a pure sense can actually be protected by copyright.

So what we have actually got is a statement coming through, that where PSI is protected by copyright access should be provided under licensing terms which do in the restrict dissemination or reuse

I call this the open licensing principle.

It's been recognized in many policy statements.

The OECD statement that led the way in 2008, their recommendation on access to public sector information, the Obama administration statement that came out on G 8 open sector data.

They don't specify particular licenses be used.

In Australia we took a step further which we actually said to give effect to open licensing, our government has adopted as the default position that specifics mentions the creative common attribution license in its policies and has adopted it in practice.

The recommendation of the council for enhanced access in PSI in 2008, the 13 principles include a principle that says that copyrights should be exercised to facilitate reuse through simple effective licensing arrangements.

More recently this year's G 8 open data charter, principle one, data should be open by default, and five, releasing data for innovation, tells us that we should use open licenses, blah blah blah.

In the United States we have the open data policy from May this year, executive memorandum open data policy, managing information an as an asset, and it tells us agencies are to apply open licenses to information, so if data are made public, there are no restrictions on publishing, copying, et cetera.

Doesn't specify a particular kind of open content, but the range applies to the creative commons open license.

Australia took it a step further and said we will use creative commons by default.

That came through in the innovation review 2008. It was considered further in the, by the government 2.0 task force in 2009 which came out with a recommendation not just any creative commons license but specific by the lease restriction of the common licenses would be the default.

That has been picked up and implemented, put into our guidance materials and so forth in Australia.

We actually have got them set up in a set of principles issued by our information commissioner. So principle one is the openness principle. And principle six is the clear reuse rights principle, which specifically mentions the CC by license.

About a year ago, only a year after those principles had been issued, the information commissioner conducted a survey to see how departments right through the Australia federal public sector, how they understood those principles and how they were implementing them in practice.

What it actually found, so only one year after those principles were first issued, it found that already, almost 60 percent of agencies were already using the CC by license, or another open content license, but essentially it was CC by as the default or intended to do so within the next 12 months.

40 percent, 48 percent of agencies had released all, most or all of PSI under open license, a quarter had published all or most under open licensing.

In Australia when they say open licensing, it essentially does mean CC by.

Personally I actually really think we have enough there to actually look at how we can implement this open lies principle which relates to licensing of copyright or other similar rights

I think we have an opportunity when we actually going forward in negotiating bilateral and regional freedom trade agreements that have intellectual property chapters, we could have done this when we negotiated the free trade agreement with the United States. The issues were not understood. There was a shift towards being able the liberate government information, make it available for reuse including commercial reuse, but the differences in Australia and U.S. legal culture at the time really got us to the point where we are really talking about the issue being should there be no copyright on government information as oh opposed to how we could effectively manage copyright would you having go through a revolutionary process of removing copyright from all government information.

Now it's possible to state the elements of the principle as applies to public sector information.

An important step in Internet governance would be to include the principle in international agreements such as bilateral, regional FTAs with IP chapters.

Doing so would not contra convenient provisions in trips or the exceptions.

Importantly this is a proinnovation approach and is consistent with good governs of the Internet.

Thank you. I have a lot of the reading material on line if you want a look.

Thank you very much.

>> Next we have Shita Laksmi.

>> Thank you for the opportunity.

Because we have a lot of panelists we have to be really quick

I like to highlight before the presentation first that this is the open data may not be that really pretty much in both countries, but transparency is most appropriate terms that we are using.

Second is we are, I'm basing my experience as a program manager in Southeast Asia transparency initiative for the last one year. These are some examples we have received from the ground.

Yes, please.

So in brief, the general context, in Indonesia and Philippines, those countries are the founders of open government partnerships.

In Indonesia we have the freedom of information law that has been enacted around 2010.

The Philippines have been on and off on the freedom of information act, so there is no Freedom of Information Act yet.

Indonesia is sharing the open government partnership this year.

Starting since first of October 2013.

And organizations as well as international organizations and the private sectors are planning to make the open data hub in Indonesia to help especially the C organizations in providing the open data that is basically related to their needs.

In the Philippines they have a bottom‑up budgeting that has been enacted by the president of aquino.

It's actually one of the issues of the transparency issue.

In November I have a friend back there named Al who can also perhaps explain further on the Philippines context, but in November there will be an open data hackathon made by the government of Philippines, so it's starting to go into the scheme of the transparency.

Next please

I get it from the blog written that it's open data, in the perspective of SEATTI, we see that open data tore truly effective there's a need for ra right to implementation, also made available in a timely reliable format that people wantrs and the rights of engagement participation.

It is really necessary to have the citizens part of the process of open data and transparency, and hopefully also the words accountability.

What we found in the gap during our work in the last one year is that technology, or open data, is not directly in the business process, in the labor stakeholders, in the government or the civil so it's or citizens themselves.

We also need a reliable interoperability data.

A lot of Indonesia experience there's disconnection between one ministry to the other on the data. It's not all interoperability.

We see there's need to have a tailor made profile to the data needs of the one asking the citizens.

There's also very low citizen engagement in terms of the participations on the need of open data because what is the use in Indonesia, there are a lot of critics, what is the use to open your data if there's no one to use the data.

So that is the gap that we found, that SEATTI has found for the last one year.

Next please.

So these are two examples that we are doing in the Philippines and Indonesia.

We have the Check My School, or by insinuation, to improve conditions to participation of school performance.

So these are the open data which is then being restored in the complaint handling mechanism in 15 schools throughout Indonesia.

So relating the data, transparency in the 15 schools.

We also support money politics unline discussion in the Philippines. It's actually a citizen guide to elections and governance in the Philippines.

We are working with PCIG, Philippine center for investigative journalism, they have the money politics online session one, but it was not engaging the citizens and we were thinking how to make that data available online being used by the citizens to be able to be part of the citizens in doing the elections and governance in the Philippines.

Next.

Yeah, thank you

I think what is needed for the Internet governance, I agree with Anne, perhaps some related to, among countries, among ministers or the government to have sort of like a framework, agreeable framework on the interoperability of the data because that is really necessary for the open data access.

>> ANNE FITZGERALD: Thank you, Shita.

Next we will have Waltraut with us to speak.

>> Yes, I'm a representative of a civil society organization, open data Hong Kong.

I'm also honorary advisory to the digital 21, which is the Hong Kong government advisory body on our future strategies

I have these two hats.

And I think Hong Kong, I mean, many of you may know Hong Kong, people ask is it China.

Not quite.

It is still independent, somewhat independent special administrative regions.

And the international term we talk about one country two systems.

And I think in open data terms we can certainly talk about one country, two very different Internet systems and policies.

Okay.

Hong Kong is an interesting case. Maybe for many other countries because navigating between being very advanced knowledge economy, looking at the world knowledge economic index, Hong Kong is very high, and not being quite open. That means having lack of freedom of information laws and having some other restrictions that we often find in nondemocracies where certain information is simply not open because it's considered confidential, commercial, or what not. Although it is coming from a public financed organization.

The Hong Kong government has just launched the 2014 strategy for digital 21.

And this has a much broader scope for PSI.

By the way, I also would like to mention, you can check how is your country actually thinking about open data by simply looking at what is it called.

In some country they talk about open data policy. In other countries they talk about public sector information.

And there's actually a difference.

So in Hong Kong and also in Singapore, they don't talk about open data.

They talk about public sector information.

And also in Europe.

So I think there's a slight difference in meaning.

And also open data does not mean open government.

That is also a very important language, linguistic thing that we need to look at when we look at policies of different countries.

So in 2011 we had our first experiment, which is like in every country, the government decides okay, let's open up some of our data sets, then they set up a portal and a website, which is normally called data.gov.country code, in Hong Kong it's called data.one.gov, HK, and then the government puts out some data sets.

Which ones, is it random, I don't know, it's not really quite random but normally starts with things like census, public facilities, weather information, traffic information, maps to certain extent.

So in a way it just is kind of data that is already in the open space or on the Internet, but now it is in open format.

And so these data sets are increased so the government opens more and more, then you have maybe food and hygiene department, environmental information.

So I think if you look at different countries, what are they opening, we find a lot of similarities

I think it's always interesting to ask what is not open.

And what is information that is still paid for.

For instance, Hong Kong is a very important center for trade.

But company registry information, for instance, although it is a public information, is not open, which is something that many journalists find disturbing because there are so many shell companies in Hong Kong operating in China and other countries, in Asia.

So it's actually quite, would be quite important to have open access to these records.

You can pay, I mean, in principle the data is open because you can actually pay a certain amount, then get the record.

But it's not open in the sense that you can do data analytics through the whole database.

So public sector, so this experiment went quite well.

And in, now for the 2014 they say public sector information is now a default. That means all future government information should be open format and open access.

And in that policy, it is quite interesting to see that basically the government is looking for innovative aps and services.

And I think that is also this kind of language is very typical for countries which are not really open.

They want to focus, they want to benefit, they want to tap into the benefits of open data, creating digital communities, aps developers, software companies that use government information. But they are not really encouraging this kind of research or critical analytics about linking data from finance, budgeting, open parliament and so on.

They really try to focus on the easy low hanging fruit where people can make interesting aps.

In fact, most of the aps that we have in Hong Kong right now are using real time traffic information.

Because it's very useful for many people to have real time traffic information. But I think there are many other issues where we would like open data, and it's just not available.

Yes, and now there's also a discussion whether data that is owned by semi governmental organizations like utility companies, utility companies, for instance, energy data would be very interesting for many environmental NGO to open that. But that is very difficult because these companies also consider the data as private or commercial data, so it's a long step to go there.

And we got in copyright it's a very complicated situation because on the data portal that the government put up, it says you can freely use all the data there. And it is free of copyright, free of licensing fees, and also you can use for commercial purposes and so on.

So if you find an environmental data set on that portal, you can use it and refer to the website.

But if you go to the website of the department of the environment, you could not use that data because there are copyright statements.

So what the government thinks that actually if the developers just use the data from the portal, the problem is gone. But I'm not sure. Maybe Anne can comment on that later, yeah.

Okay. Another test case I think is if you look at your own country, do you have open parliament applications

I think that is also a really interesting application. And we are just starting with this.

Most governments publish their minutes, the records of the meetings and decision‑making, voting records and so on. But is this an open format.

Can you use that data to manipulate and make different kind of analysis and so on, and that is something we are also just starting in Hong Kong because as you know, in 2017 Hong Kong might be the first Chinese country which has a general elections. So I think our parliament is now getting ready to release more data and make it more open, yeah.

Okay, but just to summarize, I would like to mention that really think Hong Kong and Singapore and several other country in Asia which are advanced Internet economies are not necessarily that open when it comes to open data, and it's kind of very difficult balancing act.

Thanks.

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>> Thank you, Waltraut, we will now move to Keitha booth.

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>> New Zealand and Finland have been ranked first equal in transparency internationals corruption perception index. In other words we're seen as the least corrupt nations in the world.

We're all a similar size, small. New Zealand is 4.4 million people. And government supports open government.

New Zealand government has approved three policy seatings to establish the foundations for good release of public information and data.

That was under an activity called support open and transparent government.

So we have a licensing framework, a state of principles, and a declaration to release high value public data.

And that all must be released on average on portal, gov.NZ, and also a strong mandate from government.

The policies were approved by our cabinet, and we have a ministerial committee on government, ICT.

Below that we have two committees of executives, or department heads, and they set the direction for ICT and our information reusing.

And they are all supported by the secretariat where I work.

And the agency data champions are the key tool for us in terms of ensuring that this data supply is followed out and driven in government departments.

So these data champions are at the second tier in all government departments.

So, a bit more about the policies.

The government open access and licensing framework is like the Australian one. It gives advice on how to license copyright and noncopyright material for legal reuse.

We use the creative commons licenses. Again, the default is the CC 3.0 attribute by license.

Departments can use the more restrictive licenses but they need a strong case for doing so.

For noncopyright material, they must use a no known rights statement.

The principles essentially sit the framework for managing all of our government held information.

So that is public and personal information.

So those principles which I won't go through now, no time, essentially say manage your material well, have high quality. If it's restricted material, please protect it. Otherwise, make it open in reusable formats, and where possible free because it's tax payer funded already.

And the declaration was a direct declaration to all government agencies to release public data that is nonpersonal and unclassified data with high potential value for reuse.

Now, high potential value is a user lens that supplying department must work with users of their information to know what it is they should be prioritizing.

So they need to be working with civil society, with industry, with citizens, with all facets of government to understand what is high value.

And there is our data.gov.NZ.

You see we have 2500 data sets released in open formats, and in most cases are licensed according to CC by.

And that 100 data requests there is a key feature which we have been praised globally for. Users can go on to our site and request data that they would like released which hasn't yet been released.

For other jurisdictions, suggestions, get government approval for your policies.

Our government, they expected the outcomes we have heard about, greater economic growth, better social outcomes, greater knowledge creation, greater efficiencies between departments and other sharing information and not duplicating it, and new knowledge, and of course, transparency in government performance.

So what we do in our secretariat, which we are feeling pretty proud about, we meet twice a year with those senior officials, those tier two data champions.

We release guidance for them.

We offer training.

We have a toolkit online.

Most importantly, we work with them to find out how the information has been reused, what the impact is, and we publish case studies.

And there's the link to them.

They are at ICT.gov.NZ.

We have 14 case studies showing the impact of the reuse.

Then we have our data directory, as I said.

We work with our users, then all of that is reported in an annual report to cabinet.

So we go back through that governance structure that I illustrated before, working through those, reporting to cabinet on whether the outcomes they expect have been achieved.

And we have developed a small version of a league table where government tables can check their appropriate against other departments

I focused on the supply side, but it is all driven by user demand.

Please to come and talk to me about any other detail later.

>> (Applause).

>> Thank you.

Next we are going to have Tomoaki Watanabe speak on the situation in Japan.

>> Yes, thank you.

So for the interest of time, go to next, please, I'll skip this self introduction

I will just say I have been involved in creative commons Japan as one of the leaders of Japan team

I have recently founded Open Knowledge Foundation Japan, then as of my main job is academic in the field of ICT policies and information society issues

I also sit on one of the government boards implementing open data in Japan.

Next please.

This is the menu.

My slide pack is rather extensive, and I only touch on, how do you say, the summary part.

So if you wanted to know more specific facts and wanted to get links to other resources in English, please refer to the slides or just come to me and we can talk.

I'm more than happy to actually.

Next please.

An overview.

Here is the Japan major developments.

It happened in a relatively short frame of time.

Last summer, June 2012, we finally adapted national strategy for open data. Then that was followed by a decent political support from the leadership, which is very important according to what I found from many European governments, national, municipal, as well as the U.S., which comes with strong political support in one form or another.

We had a change in the majority party, but the new majority party leader, the prime minister Abai, was very quick to endorse open data.

But he emphasized, like some of you mentioned already, economic benefits from it.

He combined actual open data with big data and position the those things as a source of economic benefits and strengths.

That may be a concern for some of us in the future.

I'll touch on that later.

Then we got a decent institution for the execution of the policy. Sorry.

Still previous one, yes.

We got decent institution for the execution, which included newly created government CEO, close to the mother, he knows what it means to be doing open data. He has some more power to influence all the different government agencies. Without it, it's very difficult to press all different government agencies to open up their data, because so many of them are kind of afraid or apprehensive about opening up their data.

And we have public‑private joint conference

I think it's called something like Working Level Personal conference for open data, which I'm sitting on.

And this is basically a joint project between government and the private sector people to explore how best to implement a policy, which is very important because open data, when done by government alone, is not going to go well, because it's very crucial to think of the users' perspective, how best to reach the data so that it could be used.

And for that, the participation and involvement of users is very important.

And then there's even a private led but publicly government supported forum which does a lot of discussions and occasional hosting of public events, including hack athons and symposiums.

Those elements, I see that it happened again within a very short frame of time, maybe within the last two years, but it's very good.

Then we got civic sector growing, which is again very important. I consider these as a part of recipe for success, for any government or any society almost in terms of open data, because again, without strong civic sector interested in making use of open data, it's not easy to expect any benefits coming out of releasing data.

So it's very good that we have technological as well as other social civic sector, having interests in open data.

And there are quite a few new organizations formed within the last two years, including open knowledge foundation Japan, but not limited to.

And then we are very close to launching a national data portal.

This would give a significant push, impetus for the movement, but I have to say, even at this point, before the launch of any national, comprehensive national data portal, we are already having hackathons and talk events and get togethers.

As I mentioned there are some organizations formed to work on open data related issues.

So civic sector is almost going ahead of the national movement.

And there are also some municipal governments. So many of those municipal governments and some invariably in many countries have strong leaders interested in making innovative policy decisions like open data.

So there are already some municipal governments in Japan already doing open data, practicing.

And there are some many other, many pioneering projects by ministries and other national government agencies, as well as municipal ties

I have some details in my slide back, but I don't discuss that much

I have to say there are two ministries very active. One is ministry of internal affairs and communications.

It used to be a post and telecom ministry and ministry of municipal ty issues. They are combined to form this ministry.

So that is one.

And another one is ministry of economy, trade and industry.

Those two ministries are the pioneers.

Then we are discussing how to evaluate the policy performance as well as the data standards, among other things.

Would you go to the next.

Okay, there are some early trials by these major government agencies.

The top two being the innovators, major players.

Others doing something, at least.

Then next please.

These are the challenges that I expect.

Short‑term we have to revisit probably the licensing and other conditions of the reuse policy because only after seriously trying to do the open data, some government agencies realize they really do not, they are not really ready to do this.

And they have to come out with some reasons why they don't want to do it, and then we will discuss the licensing issues and other conditions.

We also have to communicate any copyright over noncopyright any legal restrictions that exist regarding the use of the data.

We are trying to have some marking system inclusive of copyright but not limited to.

Then in the short‑term we have to think of policy evaluation, or how to measure the impact, especially I personally think B to B usage is key.

Then because it's difficult to capture that kind of usage.

Then in the long‑term we have to think of government operation, how best to operate the government so that it's easy to make use of the data for internal decisions as well as release the data to the public.

Then we are yet to touch on the issue of cataloging all the data that government has. That is going to be a daunting task I expect.

Here is more of a big picture issue that I have these days in mind.

Japan is getting close to this kind of first runner or front runner status by having strong support from the political leadership and some public officials who gets it, gets the idea of openness.

Japan is still a little weaker than some other governments, but we are getting close.

And there's a good institutional arrangement for the execution, public participation from civil society is good. Then there's some collaboration that we can expect reasonable amount of collaboration so that data is released, so that the users can find and use.

And those are the kind of first mover strategies as I think.

By doing this, they can create big splash, releasing huge amount of data, and attracting wider part of the society, which in turn leads to greater amount of use and extensive network among the related parties.

And that could result in some unexpected success.

We all know that data could have an unintended usage that, you know, that goes beyond imagination of the original data holder.

That is why it's important partly to publish the data.

And the last slide is the next one.

Whereas there's the other one, which I thought at one point Japan might take this route. But it seems like Japan is going away and going to the front runner mode.

There's a second mover kind of advantage to doing the open data really efficient by identifying what are the data that is high in the return on investment, and then doing careful cost benefit analysis from other governments' practice, then try to focus on only the kind of data that is going to produce great amount of benefits.

That is less risk taking, that means less of unexpected benefits as well.

So I wouldn't call this that innovative, but it might turn out to be rather efficient in a sense.

That is, I see that Japan is moving away and going to more of an innovation frontier.

That's all.

Thank you.

.

>> Great, thank you. We have heard quite a few panelists

I think it would be great the open for some questions

I know, but we have, okay. Cool, go ahead, Jeremy.

>> Okay

I was asked to take a different perspective on open data, which is more about how can the Internet governance regime do more to support open data initiatives

I have identified at least three areas related to Internet governance that could support open data.

Those are standards, intellectual property, and soft or hardware mandates to release open data.

I'm going to go through each of those in turn

I apologize that I don't have any slides

I do have a couple of papers which I'm partly drawing on. If you would like a copy of those, you can see me later, and I'll give you my card.

So on standards, it's very important of course for supporting open data that there are open standards in which the data can be published and accessed conveniently.

So the risk is that the standards that are being developed are becoming less open and interopenerable.

We have current example of the W 3 C's proposal for encrypted media extensions, which is essentially DRM on the web, which could lock up a lot of online video.

This has been supported by lobbyists from the content industries and intermediary, including Microsoft, Netflix, surprisingly also the BBC and Google.

But the broader W 3 C community has been predominantly against the addition of DRM to the web standards.

Regardless of that, the director, Tim burns Lee, has determined that the W 3 is going to proceed with the development of a specification.

One of the arguments often used in favor of this is that, well, we're just developing a standard, we're not mandating that you actual use the standard, we're just making it available for those who want it.

This concept doesn't really work because in practice we have found that, you know, if you build it, they will come.

An example is the broadcast flag specification that was developed for TV transmissions to protect content from being recorded.

Although this is was just a standard and they said there's no mandate, we're just developing a standard, don't worry, soon enough it led to a mandate from the FCC in the United States.

Admittedly that has since been eliminated mainly constitutional reasons, but it's become a de facto standard and incorporated into the digital TV standards.

And more tellingly, Microsoft ink rated it into Windows media, despite there was no requirement.

And similarly in the EU copyright directive.

A standards body saying we're not taking a policy position, we're just developing a standard on the off chance someone wants to use it, actually it does have an effect on policy debates.

The availability, the effort of going to develop the standard actually leads into the expectation that it will be used by policy makers and mandated by policy makers, so that is dangerous, and the standards bodies need to be alert to this and proactive in seeking stakeholder input beyond the engineering community.

They need to realize lobbyisteds are going to be at their door trying to push these standards through, and broader public intermaybe not being represented.

So A, they need to be proactive in seeking broader input. And B, they need to allow bodies that are more specialized in public policy development to drive their standards development agendas.

So that includes governments but also includes bodies like the IGF.

We should have more influence in what, say, the WC 3 is doing, what standards it's developing and it's retraining from developing.

That is number one, standards.

Number two, intellectual property.

It is of course a grab bag of various different legal regimes which include copyright, patents, and suir gen ris database rights, and all three apply.

It's important for copy rate to have material to dedicate to the public domain.

Licensing is a hack around copyright limitations in a sense. If you just don't want to have any protection at all, you should be able to dedicate data to the public domain and not every legal regime allows this. In some legal regimes it's impossible to get stuff into the public domain without waiting for 50 or 70 or 120 years.

So that is important.

It's important not to have database rights, which Europe has, America doesn't.

So they are not, they generally are a stumbling block to open data.

And in terms of patent, it's important not to extend patent rights to things that we want to access in open data sets such as productive nature like DNA.

So how can we make sure that these needed flexibilities are in intellectual property rules being established at the transnational level?

Well, certainly processes that have been used to set new IP rules, such as actor and the trans Pacific partnership, are not an act acceptable model

I have been following tweets from another panel I was interested in trying to follow both at once, and they were saying exactly the same thing, that we need to have more of a multi stakeholder model in global IP policy development.

We have that in, it's a work in progress for Internet governance, but that is certainly our aim, to be multi stakeholder, and we have been trying for that in documents like the Tunis agenda which have set out basic standards for multi stakeholder in Internet governance, but what about IP policy development.

We need to be sure it extends there so needed flexibilities are not just ignored when new instruments like Acta and TPP are being pushed through.

So due to shortness of time I'm going to skip a few points.

And then thirdly, the soft law hard law mandates.

The earliest of these I'm aware of is when the OACD issued its principles and guidelines for access to research data from public funding in 2007.

And that was certainly a good step.

The OACD of course is a relatively limited organization geographically, and so it's, and at the time also, this was in 2007, so it was just prior to the extension of the OACD advisory committee, to include an advisory committee for civil society which exists now.

Although it was a very good start, I think a better example that followed is the Open Government Partnership, which had a more multi stakeholder process.

One of the principles of the Open Government Partnership was as follows.

It says we commit to proactively provide high value information, including raw data, in a timely manner in formats the public can easily locate, understand, and use, and in form mats that facilitates reuse.

These are both soft law instruments and made reference to the fact there is no treaty.

So should we work towards a treaty? That is a very good question.

If we do, then we should certainly try and strive towards a multi steak header process fully inclusive of civil society.

It is possible do this.

This year of course WIPO ended up agreeing on the merakesh treaty for the blind and that was a relatively inclusive process.

If we can work towards in the longer term the development of a treaty for open data, that would be beneficial if we can include that with a multi stakeholder process

I have other points but I'll leave it there. And if you want more information you can catch up with me later.

Thank you.

>> (Applause).

>> Now I will open up the floor for questions.

After that, that will be for about ten minutes, and after that we take the remote panelists.

Go ahead.

>> (Off microphone).

>> Was everyone able to hear that?

The core of what we are concerned with at the WC 3, yes, there is the DRM concern.

Yes, the W 3 C has decided that it's within the charter to work on that stuff

I agree whole heartedly with your multi stakeholder comments. It needs to be multi‑stakeholder.

The problem is that WC 3 is already multi‑stakeholder.

When we put out the call to get comments from the public, from government on digital rights management in HTML, very few people came forward and made any comments.

It's completely open to the public. People can do it, it's just nobody did it.

So what that does is it makes it seem as if civil society and the public don't really care that much about DRM, right? Because if they did, they would have had somebody from government come and say something.

What ends up happening is the engineers ends up fighting against it and Netflix and Google come in and flatten the engineers, they say we are a higher organization, we have business needs not being met, and civil society hasn't stepped in to say this is problematic.

My question is what can we do to remedy that? Because it's already set up in the way that you said it should be set up, but it's not working.

So how do we address that?

>> It's a good question.

There were some groups that did weigh in on this, the free software foundation, electronic frontiers foundation.

EFF joined as W 3 C member at a cost of several thousand dollars per year. It has quite high membership fees which is an impediment to participation

I think one of the problems is that the W 3 C is seen as just, I don't mean this in a negative way at all, seen as a technical standards body rather than a body that deals with larger public policy issues.

And this runs it into problems.

Not just in this case, but there are other examples such as the do not track standard which ran into similar problems where lobbyists descended on the group.

It was trying to decide the broader public policy dimensions of this issue rather than just dealing with the technical issues, which it's much better suited to.

And in some ways, I said this in a previous panel, I don't blame the W 3 C so much for that

I blame European commission and the Federal Trade Commission for going to the C 3 C and letting them sort out this policy issue rather than providing proper guidance to say this is exactly what should be done at a policy level. You sort out the nuts and bolts

I think the W 3 C is in a difficult position, but the best that it can do is to, as I tried to say, be more proactive rather than just having an open door and saying you come to us, rather than it needs to go out to the community and pull people in and say we need you.

Even to support them in some way with finance for travel to meetings, things like that.

This is difficult.

Other bodies have the same problem, the OACD has the same problem.

They have an open door, but physical travel to meetings is a barrier.

Time

I work for the global consumer movement.

We have 240 members in 120 countries.

Member organizations in 120 countries.

But the number of issues I'm required to deal with are staggering.

There's one full‑time person from my organization dealing with all technology issues, and it's me.

So there are big capacity deficits there, and there needs to be some work done by the standards organizations, by the intergovernmental organizations, to help redress those capacity deficiencies.

Anyone else on the panel want to offer anything?

Thanks for the question.

>> Thank you, hi, I come from Thailand.

I'm working for a civic group who try to initiate the open data in Thailand

I would like to thank you all panelists, officially

I also have question that you said you have a short time, two years for working on the open data in Japan

I would like to know what is the success factor for making success.

And also maybe this question is for all panelists, it's about how you measurement about the benefits of the citizens from the open government data, how to measure, which way to measure that.

Thank you.

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>> Mr. Watanabe: Thank you for the question.

The key question, why Japan could make progress in such a short amount of time, that's a good question, but I think it helped the U.S. was making a big splash and the E. U was making a major revision of the PSI directive.

That meant in the typical Japanese policy circle, that means we have to do something to catch up.

That is a very familiar story to us.

So we did some international research in key min ministries and research institutions as well as think tanks bought the idea because of the wide spread use of smart phones that can be used as platform for aps, and as well as the buzz that existed already regarding the data, which is big data.

So it kind of made an immediate click.

It was easy for many people in the industry, the government and the private sector, the civic sector, that this is going to happen, this is going to be interesting, this is going to benefit the society.

So that is why maybe people jumped on to the band wagon very quickly.

The other thing that is rather domestic but not necessarily limited to Japan, I remember talking with Keitha about two years ago? One and a half years ago maybe, at Asia Pacific regional IPF in Tokyo.

That in New Zealand and maybe even tie lad and Japan, disaster prompted the government to look into the data communication even within the government agencies as well as partnering with other relief organizations and civic sector or private sector.

If you have an earthquake of that magnitude, everyone who can help has to do some help. But coordination is such a crucial part of the effectiveness of relief or immediate disaster response support.

So Japan actually turned its open government policy directions to focus more on open data, some people say, after that major earthquake.

That is another unfortunate success factor that affected Japan.

>> I would also like to add something here.

Disaster is very helpful in bringing together different stakeholders.

But it could be also any other issue in the national or city level that is of concern to many people.

Many cities it could be environmental issues, climate change, adaptation issues. Everything you can see putting different steak holders together and creating a good solution together makes sense.

In Hong Kong we have a big discussion now on inequality, you know, having really poor people in a very rich city.

How can we have new ideas of dealing with poverty or a new understanding on poverty, that is one issue.

Another thing I find more and more important is to have a really good university courses on data science.

In many countries it means you don't have this, which means you don't have the people who have the skills to use this data.

In Hong Kong we have to skills which are very good and have open data journalism courses and research centers.

That I think is really critical because they are the expert who can bridge dean open society and government, because they have the stories that are interesting for a city or nation.

>> I'll pick up on the data journalism and the earthquake crisis.

We have been able to persuade journalism trainers to introduce courses part of the university structure. In the near future journalists going through normal courses will also learn about how to investigate and use data.

That is a big step.

In terms of our earthquake, there was a great movement by open data people to help get important information out to people about where they could by petro, get prescriptions, get from A to B.

Now picking up on that and making sure that the infrastructure will continue after the crisis to prevent that reliance on data that it wasn't authoritative and stored by the local authority, now becoming something that they do.

And one final thing, every government has its priority, make sure you're working on the data that is going to help the government deliver on its priorities. That is of great importance to your political masters.

>> I would like to answer on how to measure.

Indonesia where on the base of Indonesia where the country open data or data is not by culture not as part of the decision making process, I think how to measure the open data is part of the open government, open data is part of transparency.

And I think how to engage with the cities and have a quality dialogue with the citizen and the public holders, institutions, and I think also how the demand from the citizens is also being close, I think that is really important for the open data.

>> Hello, my name is Mark Ano, open data consortium in Indonesia.

My concern is on the demand side of open data.

As we, as many countries have successful effort in making data open to public, my question is how to make people, citizens, also industry using the data.

Because in Indonesia, there's great experience in passing freedom of information law, and it's a great law, but after the law is passed, enacted, and the problem is the demand of the public information is very slow. Very small rate of demands.

It's a big investment building the infrastructure system, the commission, et cetera.

So my question is, do you have experience how to promote people using the open data, how to increase the demand of open data.

Thank you.

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>> Yes, that is the most important question and hardest one to answer. Because countries are required under the Freedom of Information Act to respond to requests for information, whereas this the turning the whole issue around and making information available ahead of those requests.

But then you don't know what to make available if you haven't had the requests.

So we're working with our government departments to encourage them to work with their users, to have a better understanding of how the data is used themselves.

And that takes time, but we have seen some really good examples even with our statistical department, where you would think they would know how official statistics are used.

They are now working much more closely with their core stakeholders and have broadened the range of those stakeholders to go beyond government, which had been the traditional audience for official statistics.

So if you want to come and talk to me later, I have some other examples.

>> I have a comment from remote participants, the remote hub at QUT, about the as in natural disasters also played a role in the Australian story towards developing CC licensing.

These were bush fires rather than earthquakes, however.

>> Thank you, Pakistan foundation civil policy.

My question might be opposite to the previous.

So do you see any ways of how to encourage governments of repressive or near repressive countries, not transparent, and often corrupted, how to everybody courage them to publish data, how to encourage them to support open data initiatives.

Thank you.

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>> May I try?

Yeah, I'll be short. Because I'm not from an oppressive country.

In general I think it helps first to show the international rankings, perceived transparency index.

There are some other open data specific international rankings and metrics comparing different countries.

And then there are some specificfications what to do, how to do open data.

Another one Keitha mentions some examples, how successful open data could be, how beneficial it could be to the citizens, the economy, and telling politicians what we are missing out by not doing open data.

That would be my strategy.

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>> I would add that I think it's really important to couch this not just in terms of transparency, human rights, et cetera

I think in many countries it's very much a challenge, but you want to get in the skills and understanding of why this is important.

That is why I tend to take it more from innovation.

There are areas where it's not political sensitive at all and you can very readily make the case. In fact essentially in the major literature review I did, if we go up to where this really took off, so before 2008, 2009, what you will find, you can go back 50 years or more and we have all these great science collaborations.

Really you have the genesis of an organization that is still quite vibrant and involves cooperation of scientists from around the world co‑data which is all based around science data. In fact some of the most inspiring presentations that I have actually seen, some of the best collaborations that I have seen, are actually in the science community.

The skills, the concepts, the ideas are really actually pretty much similar.

They are already governments or government funded organizations in the research space, which actually do collaborate very effectively and open up data in various ways. But it tends to actually be within a specifically defined community under their own rules.

They may actually have rules of international cooperation for how science operates in this area in some cases, such as the and the Antarctic, we have a treaty system where it says open data is required for the research under the treaty.

Perhaps a different angle where you can see the benefits. Essentially I guess it's really establishing the practices and mindset so that ultimately when socially, politically countries are able to make steps more towards openness and transparency, it would be extended to other areas.

That is probably the approach that I would have.

>> One final point, the Open Government Partnership, I think about 50 countries who joined now. It may be those, some of those countries are working with others to encourage their participation at a very high level.

But it is difficult.

>> Mr. Watanabe: One more thing, in many countries, I don't know about kiristan, the people who support open data come from the Wiki community, open source, developers and creative commons team, all those people who are in the openness movement at large, they are very quick to organize and support the initiatives.

So if your country hosts some of those, that is maybe one of the first things to try.

>> Thank you, we're going to move to the remote panelists now.

First up will be Romain Lancomb who is leading the policy under the French prime minister.

(Silence).

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>> Make sure that you can actually be moderator, so that we can, they can let me know.

But generally speaking, I just would like to explain some of the objectives of the open government data policy in France and some of the key initiatives we developed to leverage what has emerged as this data economy, this Internet of data, in a way this network of connected and open data, to on the one hand open the French government, and on the other hand to make sure we connect citizens and empower innovators.

So I'm representing the government lab in French which is the French minister's open government data task force.

We were created in early 2011, so a couple years ago, with three main objectives.

We are tasked with organizing the open government data in France, first of all as a means to make the government more transparent and more accountability, a direct means of accountability.

We expect and have worked on open government data to modernize government as well.

And finally, of course an instrument for innovation.

So we have, in the first year, in 2011, we have built up a sort of basis on which to build the open government policy. First of all with of course the group platform, the data (breaking up).

That was launched the end of 2011.

We have organized a network of civil servants inside government who are tasked with organizing openness in the ministry or agency or government, and really working with a sort of decentralized network (Internet connection problem. Skype attempting to reconnect).

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(Attempting to reconnect).

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(Attempting to reconnect).

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>> (Okay, I'm trying to speak again here.

Looks like the connection.

>> If you can't hear, we can't hear.

We'll go on as we planned.

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>> Okay, so I should (breaking up).

The key points (hard to hear).

(Inaudible).

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>> Improve the quality of democracy in our country, and access to information, quote/unquote, in that regard.

So the three points that we have development, first of all, the new government roadmap earlier this year in terms of direction for the open government policy.

Focuses on new initiative and recommended challenges in order to remove (inaudible).

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>> Can you come back down? We will have comment on this.

>> ANNE FITZGERALD: We have a very short set slides sent through from Jim from the U.K. national archives.

I'm going to briefly run through these.

We'll make these available on line

I have 30 copies.

Very briefly through the national archives perspective on developments in the U.K.

What they are looking at is they are working on open data strategies, review of public sector information carried out but step and Shakespeare, they have establish the data.gov.UK and work going on with their transparency board and panel as well.

Next slide, global development from the U.K. perspective, they are actually the current chair of the G 8.

As president and lead cochair of the international open government participate partnership, they are on the open stage.

The summit is been held shortly and open data is a significant part of the work of the partnership.

In 2013 the U.K. is also the president of the G 8 met earlier this year. As we saw in my presentation, the open data charter.

Okay.

Open data charter, the director, important statements of principle, open data charter sets up five strategic principles, including the expectation that all government data will be published openly by default with principles also to increase quality, reuse, and quantity of data that is made available.

And there's in fact an EU directive of 2013 that amends the directive of 2003 on the reuse of public sector information.

This was recently adopted in June of this year to achieve a workable solution.

Member states have to insubstitute a workable absolutely by 2015.

These are on the slides.

PSI directive has specific implications for museums, libraries, and archives in the public sector which are within scope. There are some special rules that are going to apply in this area.

Again, that information is on the slides if you need to read that in more detail.

Also there's some interesting initiatives going on in the U.K. national archives.

They have an online catalog, discovery, with an API which provides a vast resource for developers, academic, enthuse of its to reuse the data.

That goes back to how to enable the users to reuse the data.

Here we have in the U.K. an example of a national archives, a vast store of data actually making it possible for its customers out there not only in the U.K. but worldwide to in fact use that.

They have an example here of just the visualization in the center of the slide which shows the volumes of naturalization into Great Britain into each country by year, and they have a spike shown in red on the graph which shows the impact of an event like the Chinese cultural revolution on the increase in Chinese naturalization.

That comes from the home office, declaration of allegiance, an example of hey, you can use what we talked about before in the earlier session, the ministry of records, and you can find ways of getting the data out and making it tell a story.

That is from Jim Wretham, they couldn't participate because of the time difference, but Jim has been actively involved in this area of opening up government data for many years.

>> Being mindful of the time, we have about ten minutes.

Think I'm going to open up to questions if someone has any questions.

Just one question, and final remarks from the panel.

Be brief.

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>> Working from Jeremy's open standards sort of take, I'd like to ask the panelists if their countries have a specific open standards policy.

And it seems important that for open data, open standards are either mandated, and please tell if it's a mandate or if it's an option, and how you come to that decision, whatever it is.

Thanks.

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>> I'll start. In New Zealand we have guidelines on using open source. We don't have an open standards policy that's been approved.

We do in our gul principles represent no use of DRN.

>> In Japan I think I have heard some open data related people suggesting that maybe we should try to abide by the open standard as well as using open source software.

But I don't think it's practices.

There's no official decision yet.

.

>> This whole area of open standards and government is something that really has not received a great amount of attention. Standards are not something that people tend to research information they are outside the communities that develop standards

I did some research on this a few years back, a paper of mine online which is open standards and government, think it's called moving towards open standards

I think what you will find in many countries' standards frame worse, there is discussion of the importance of governments using open standards where they possibly can.

The other side of the coin is that it shouldn't be the case that governments require the general community, because of the regulatory effect of doing so, of using proprietary standards or adopting standards which require the use of proprietary technologies because that would be actually an added impasse on the community.

Essentially standards when used or incorporated by governments into legal or legislative or administrative frameworks can in effect have a regulatory effect.

Governments need to be cautious in requiring standards which would require additional expenditure on the use of technology.

>> Think generally there's a movement towards open standards that is a big area within the open data movement.

>> Thank you.

Two minutes left.

No time for questions.

If there's any like last minute remarks from any of the panelists, just one.

Let me know, and we're going wrap up so you guys can go and have some lunch.

>> A lot has already been achieved and there's been a lot of development in the last few years.

Think we're seeing a lot of international agreement and cohesiveness developing around some of the aspects of where we need to go

I think there are ways that we can start really consolidating that.

>> I think the whole PSI took off in the past two years.

If you know events like the open knowledge conference and Open Data Institute

I think internationally there are a lot more attention to open data these days.

So maybe formally it started in 2008 with the OECD principles, but I think only in the past one or two years we can really see, seen developments in the most surprising countries, and that is really interesting to watch.

>> Mr. Watanabe.

As academic I attend many conferences where invariably I find the most interesting discussions happen actually between the sessions.

So please do not hesitate, come to us and further discuss. There's so much, so much more.

>> I'm not going keep you from your lunch. Enjoy.

>> All of the slides will be made available on line.

There's also a workshop evaluation that has been made available by the IGF, so we appreciate you filling that out.

Thanks everyone.

The U.K. slides are also there from the U.K. National Archives.

We would definitely like to thank the remote participants.

We really are sorry we couldn't have the remote panelists, all of them, speak today.

Thank you guys for coming, given that it is a packed room, actually seems like this is a really relevant topic for the Internet Governance Forum.

Thank you.

>> (Applause).

(Session ended at 12:42).

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