The case of Open Data Euskadi was presented yesterday at a EU seminar held in Brussels: Improving Transparency in Government Decision Making – what targets could be defined.

Alberto Ortiz de Zarate, an official from the Basque Government, presented our case with these slides and the text alongside it.

As Ortiz de Zarate put it up, to speak about transparency is to talk about opening up information. He recognised that it was not easy to instill change in the organisation, the Basque autonomous administration in this case. Anyway, with effort, change could be pushed forward. “Political leadership has been essential for internal change”, Ortiz de Zarate explained. “And then, the higher officials must believe and make their teams believe. But the internal change is an everlasting job. To open up the Administracion you’ll have to start by opening it to the internal participation. In public institutions, there are many skillful people whose ideas have ever never been taken advantage of. The first place for change is inside.” The path for that internal change included the following measures:

• Innovation workshops, open to all staff.
• Communities of practice, to join professionals who share an area of knowledge.
• Blogs and other social tools designed for internal use …. although published openly to instil the principle of transparency.
• Trust: “Do it. Better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.”

So, at the end, the following messages were spread among departments:

• Public information belongs to citizens
• By default everything is published
• The reuse of information is a right and also an asset for the country
• Not just releasing operational data but also sensitive information to stop corruption

And those were the foundations that permitted the creation of Open Data Euskadi.

Ortiz de Zarate’s presentation was not only about the Basque Open Data initiative, bat also about the Irekia portal (meaning Open in Basque), which has brought opened several information channels towards the public, in a sort of permament beta. One of the latest Irekia moves has been the budget visualization tool that Ortiz de Zarate mentioned (also explained here at our blog), and that created interest among other participants. With the budget visualization tool, “any citizen can easily understand where their money goes to. Even they can write down their annual incomes and know exactly how they are contributing”. As Ortiz de Zarate, transparency is nothing without a society which is involved in the public affairs.: “We say ‘there is no good government without good citizens’. Engagement is the keyword now. Every citizen is a ruler, every citizen is a journalist, every citizen is a civil servant”.

An European Commision report on Open Data portals has been released recently, and its content is based mainly in four case studies. One of those is ours, Open Data Euskadi, the Basque regional initiative. The other three are state initiatives in the UK, Denmark and France.

The analysis referred to Open Data Euskadi emphasizes the quantity of datasets, usage statistics, and good practice examples like the Euroalert service. It also highlights that political leadership has been important to develop the initiative, at the same time pursuing a strategy of low costs. For instance, the report says: “As a positive example, the Basque Country did not organize an independent competition for Open Data applications, but instead co-funded the Spanish and the European competitions”.  The study also mentions that the main re-user of the information released is the administration itself: the effort to systematize datasets in reusable formats helps better governance practices.

The report, drafted by a committee of consultants, can be found here (PDF in English). We are glad to be mentioned there, certainly.