Opendata.ch/2019 Forum: review and outlook

  • Forum

We held the Opendata.ch/2019 Forum on 4 July in Bern-Wankdorf in the format of an “unconference”. The format enabled us to obtain a wide range of information from our participants.

Interests, experience and feedback

At the end of the Forum, 106 participants (out of a total of ~170) handed in their participant badge with information about their interests and experience and their feedback on the Forum:

  • 63 participants told us what they were interested in today.
  • 70 participants told us what they have experience with.
  • 92 participants told us what they liked today.
  • 80 participants told us what they missed today.

We have documented this information as data and are making it available under an open licence for free reuse: https://github.com/OpendataCH/opendatach-stats – We look forward to further analyses and feedback.

We ourselves have produced the following analyses.

Questions, needs, topics and challenges

To set up the Forum programme together, we asked all participants at the beginning to write on a slip of paper what they would like to discuss with others today.

118 slips with a question, a need, a topic or a challenge found their way back to us after being weighted by interest by three to four participants.

  • 8 slips had a total weighting of ’20’.
  • 8 slips had a total weighting of ’19’.
  • 12 slips had a total weighting of ’18’.
  • 12 slips had a total weighting of ’17’.
  • 19 slips had a total weighting of ’16’.
  • 15 slips had a total weighting of ’15’.
  • 13 slips had a total weighting of ’14’.
  • 8 slips had a total weighting of ’13’.
  • 6 slips had a total weighting of ’12’.
  • Rest: 17 slips with a total weighting of ’11’ or lower.

Workshops were held at the Forum on the 47 questions, needs, topics or challenges with the highest weightings.

We have also documented this information as data and are making it available under an open licence for free reuse: https://github.com/OpendataCH/opendatach-stats

We ourselves have produced the following analyses.

A word cloud of all needs

Our next steps

Based on our analyses, we reflected on how well we, as the Opendata.ch association, already cover the core needs of our community, and in which areas there is the greatest need for action.

Four areas of action have emerged that we want to address more strongly in future:

  • Freeing data
  • Data protection
  • Data quality
  • Data use

The strong presence of the topic of data protection is remarkable. Together with our community, we must make the relationship between data protection and openness easier to understand, in order to strengthen and promote both data protection and the importance and publication of open data.

We defined the first measures and responsibilities for the four areas of action at our board meeting on 5 August:

  • Freeing data: active policy work, demands, offers of help
  • Data protection: positioning, possibly lobbying, assistance
  • Data quality: active policy work, demands, offers of help
  • Data use: example uses, support for uses

Secondly, we decided to send a summary of the insights gained, with five core demands, to the offices at the FDHA and the FSO entrusted at federal level with the Open Government Data Strategy 2019-2023. This letter was sent this week.

Get involved in the goals of the Forum

If you would like to help tackle one of the areas of action listed above or launch another activity, we and our community will be happy to support you.

The Opendata.ch/2019 Forum made the needs, challenges and opportunities of open data in Switzerland transparent. And it clearly showed that nobody is alone with any question, need or topic. Together we can create clarity and remove obstacles.

To connect you with people who share the same interests and the ambition to become active, please let us know of your interest via info@opendata.ch. That way we can connect you with like-minded people and, if you wish, set up a working group for you.

Visual memories