Message in a bottle from Paris Region: The hackathon is just the kick-off of the long-term open data strategy!

Finally, Gregoire Odou from Ile-de-France area gives us insights on the open data project in this part of the Paris Region.

In the Paris region datastore, data can be displayed by means of histograms and interactive maps, a precise search engine that helps you to navigate into all dataset, and all dataset refer to the 4-stars level according to the 5-stars framework of Tim Berners-Lee.

A very important result was the development of synergies between all departments of the Regional Council, during the set-up of the platform and the reuse of the data released .

“The main focus of the Ile-De-France Region open data project” – says Gregoire – “was on Regional Council departments: internal partners (departments of the Regional Council), and implementing agencies of the Regional Council (30): all these partners release data in very different sectors, which allows us to provide a complete data portal able to be attractive for all inhabitants“.

All partners were committed and organized at different levels : internal meetings, steering committees, and “on-site inspections” to identify data that can be released.

On-site inspections are carried out by an open data referent that has been appointed in each of the external organization of the region and in each of the department of the region.

An important hackathon was organized by Regional Council Ile-de-France and La Fonderie during a weekend in March 2013 around geographical data provided by the Regional Urbanism Institute about the Global Master Plan of the Region : http://hackathon.iledefrance2030.fr/.

This event was conceived as the kick-off of the open data strategy of the Region, and it was aimed at showing and demonstrating the concrete possibilities offered by the release of data.

In this case, data provided were related to the urban master plan of the Ile-de-France region. This kind of data are usually very complex and difficult to understand for citizens, (http://hackathon.iledefrance2030.fr/datadocs/). The event was therefore a good example to show that by releasing these data new services for citizens and inhabitants can be developed within the region.

Results of the event can also be found here:  http://hackathon.iledefrance2030.fr/10-projets/, even if the most curious use of the data opened during the hackathon is the application “Brigand futé” (http://www.brigandfute.com/#!/welcome): a group of ten teams compete to develop the best applications – based on the open data – capable of devising the most effective and sustainable metropolitan area in 2030.

Finally, Gregoire tells us what are the three most important lessons learned from their Open Data experience with respect to engagement with stakeholders:

• Do not underestimate the evangelization work upstream of the approach;

• To give priority to long-term process and not only events (as a matter of fact, the March 2013 event was not just a single-shot event, but rather was carried out as the kick-off of a long-term strategy for opening and data and promoting an effective use of them;)

• Be able to integrate the open data community and to create a network (very important in such an emerging area).