Transparancy & Open Government in the Netherlands
In its final session before the end of the year, the Dutch Parliament has adopted a motion that calls upon the government to enact pro-active openness by default. Ton Zijlstra wrote a nice blogpost about it on the EPSI-platform. As a civil servant i am quite happy this principle has been adopted and we can go full speed ahead on transparancy in 2013. Together with the other participants in the Open Government Initiative.
It also fits in the general development of transparancy of government information in the Netherlands. Although a lot needs to be done, in several fields we have achieved a quite astonishing level of transparancy. For example with the building and adress administration. I have added a picture of my house below.
This BAG-viewer is only in dutch but available at: http://bagviewer.geodan.nl/
But there is also the amazing PDOK-site which is available in english: https://www.pdok.nl/en/node
Which provides access to various geo-datasets and even offer you the possibility to embed a map in your website. Completely open and free.
As you can see, in the field of Geo-information we achieved quite a lot but other fields are following. All Open Data in the Netherlands can be accessed through our open data portal: https://data.overheid.nl/
In 2013 a lot of works remains to be done, also in the field of financing the use of governmentdata and abolish internal pricing/charging as much as possible which is quite a challenge in time of cutbacks. Also there will be a lot of emphasis on improving workprocesses within government both from a quality perspective as with regard to efficiency, by using both open and closed government data.
This short blog does not provide a complete overview but if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask.
AI monopolies are the strategic issue (not privacy)
In my work i am fully involved in trying to give citizens more control of their data, protect their privacy as much as possible. Implementation of GDPR among other things can help to improve the rights of european citizens with regard to data. However i have the feeling many people and politicians are missing the big picture. In the end privacy is not the most important subject, not for governments and not for companies. It's about AI and the power that comes with it. Roughly speaking, data, cloud computing, specialised hardware, algorithms and human talent are the ingredients for delivering succesful AI services. As AI moves towards more applications and slowly becomes a more general purpose technology, big companies (Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Baidu and others) are gearing up to become the dominant players. Although dataleaks, privacy breaches, webcookies, search monopolies are all relevant subjects, they are subjects from yesterday. Governments should worry m...
Reacties