Reuse of Public Sector Information Act — One Year After Coming into Effect

For quite some time now, there has been growing interest in public data — interest expressed by the governments, business and citizens. Andrus Ansip, Vice President of the European Commission and European Commissioner for Digital Single Market said in one of his speeches: “If I had to express my views about the digital future — that of Europe or of whole world — I could do it with one word. The word is data.”

The use of public data brings a lot of benefits such as improvement of the administration works, increasing the quality of data collected by the public sector, development of business and social initiatives, solving broadly defined social problems or strengthening the position of citizens towards the authorities and through civic participation.

Making public data available, however, is only the first step to fully exploit their social potential. The second step is to create a simple and effective mechanism of public sector information reuse conditioning the process of benefitting from public data. Uncomplicated practice in this field is indispensable to both public subjects and citizens — especially in the context of creating innovative products and information services. In the report covering the market related aspects of the use of public sector information, Graham Vickery states that the economic value of public sector information directly results from the fact that in the economy based on information, knowledge is always the source of competitive advantage.

Together with Natalia Mileszyk (Centrum Cyfrowe) and Krzysztof Izdebski (ePaństwo Foundation) we decided to take a closer look at how the Polish Act on reuse of public sector information functions in practice, how it is useful to applicants and how it is applied by public subjects. We submitted requests regarding public information access to the selected institutions obliged to apply the Act in Poland. Each of the selected units was asked to respond to several questions regarding the implementation of the Reuse Act. We presented our research in the report Reuse of Public Sector Information Act — One Year After Coming into Effect”.

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Magdalena Siwanowicz

Written by

Magdalena Siwanowicz — lawyer. I am a Legal Specialist in EPF http://epf.org.pl/en/.

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