France’s first chief data officer (CDO), Henri Verdier, recently submitted his first annual report to the French prime minister detailing the state of open data in the country, as well as the considerable progress made since the position was created in September 2014, reports Computer Weekly.
The mere act of appointing a CDO was one of the principal reasons France catapulted to the number four spot in the Open Data Barometer published by Tim Berners Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation.
Moreover, the country is now a prominent member of another worldwide organisation, the Open Government Partnership, a “multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption and harness new technologies to strengthen governance”, according to its website.
However, even before Verdier became CDO, France was already working hard to become a more digitally powerful government, with the portal data.gouv.fr in 2011, with over 21,000 datasets now available on the site.
While this is only a small fraction of the 10 million government datasets Gartner estimates to be currently available worldwide, Verdier claims that through data.gouv.fr, the French government had already created economic and social value in five different ways:
- Reducing transaction costs: Because data is available for re-use, citizens and enterprises don’t have to spend the time and money producing or gathering the data themselves.
- Stimulating innovation: The French government has helped startups by providing some of the data entrepreneurs need to create new products and services. One example is the company Snips, which applies cutting-edge data science techniques to open data to provide a tourism app to customers.
- Ensuring equal access: France has created a more competitive economy by providing the same amount and quality of information to all organisations, big and small.
- Creating feedback loops: Consumers of open data feed up-to-the-minute data back into the system. For example, traffic applications make recommendations on optimal routes to drivers by accessing the latest data. These same applications update the datasets based on what they observe about current traffic patterns.
- Creating an ecosystem of collaboration: Consumers of open data also contribute to data quality by making corrections and improvements to the datasets they use.