The Future is Data 2023 — report from the conference
This year’s The Future is Data open data conference in Poland was an insightful overview of how open data is developing in Europe and what we can expect in September 2023, when the high-profile Data Act comes into force. Why “high-profile”? This thread should be of particular interest of everyone.
III Open data conference The Future is Data 2023 — the most interesting topics
Those who think that the conference on open data “Future is Data” which took place on April 18, 2023 duplicated topics from previous years are wrong. You can check it out for yourself by looking at our reports from the 2022 and 2021 conferences. The organizer, the Chancellery of the Prime Minister in Poland, including in particular the Data Management Department, approached the subject in a practical way, focusing on the most important current issues.
Of course, this year there were also interesting facts like the stories of benefits of open data and good practices regarding data management, this time, however, a large part of the conference was occupied by new regulations:
- Data Act,
- Data Governance Act (so-called DGA),
- Digital Markets Act (so-called DMA),
- Artificial Intelligence Act (so-called AI act)
- and the Digital Services Act (DSA).
Among the threads that in our subjective opinion were the most interesting (and you can probably trust the data software house Transparent Data in this matter), we have selected a few, which we have described in more detail later in this article:
- Stories of open data from Spain, Ireland, Ukraine, Italy and Estonia — what stands behind the success of the trendsetters of the Open Data Maturity ranking?
- What will the Data Act change? A bit about the first such comprehensive legislative foundation of the European data exchange model.
- When will B2G data sharing be paid for, and when will the government be able to use these resources for free?
- How to understand the DGA Data Management Act? What new definitions of open data it brings to the data market and what changes in the access.
- High value data over time — an interesting project The use case observatory, a study of 30 specific cases.
As an official social partner of the largest open data conference in Poland, Future is Data 2023 and data software house, whose business products, such as Business Registers 360 or API with economic information, are based on open data, we invite you to read this agile shortcut. If you don’t want to read and prefer to watch individual lectures, have a look here:
Future is Data 2023 conference broadcast (video):
Go to the page: Otwarte Dane
I. Open Data Stories from Spain, Ireland, Ukraine, Italy and Estonia
At the Future is Data 2023 conference, as many as 5 representatives of the top of the latest Open Data Maturity ranking performed:
- Mykhailo Kornieiev from the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, which is currently ranked 2nd,
- Ossian Smyth from the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform of Ireland (ranked 4),
- Ott Velsberg from the Ministry of Economy and Communications of Estonia (5th place),
- Miguel Ángel Amutio from the General Secretariat of the Digital Administration of Spain (7th place),
- Alessandro Musumeci from the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Italy (8th place).
**The number 1 ranking in Europe is currently France, number 3 is Poland
Each of them presented briefly how each country supports open data and explained the mission behind it.
Ossian Smyth spoke about the clear path Ireland has taken: “We want people to live better. People use the Internet and want to contact the government in the same way. — he said, noting that “Data privacy is an issue. If we protect privacy too much, it gives users the impression that they have to give the same data over and over to different authorities. You have to find the golden balance.”
To this end, in 2019 Ireland introduced the Data Management and Sharing Act, which regulates when data can be shared between different departments and data sharing agreements. The idea is to collect data only once and use it many times. Each large government IT project goes through a specially created department.
Mykhailo Kornieiev, in turn, talked about what Ukraine has managed to achieve in the field of opening data over the last 7 years. In the beginning, it was simply about fighting corruption. Now they want to involve all actors. Ukrainian society demands such transparency. Business can apply for data that is currently not open and the Ministry of Digitization of Ukraine regularly considers such requests — if the data is of high value, then they actually open the data, and users can track the data opening process. There is a Data Opening Competence Center dealing with education, and an open data platform that makes information from various sectors public — from health, through the economy, to even plans to rebuild Ukraine after the war.
He stressed that the government of Ukraine wants the public to be able to use public data and this is one of the factors that distinguishes Ukraine from Russia — open data is a fundamentally European mentality.
M. Kornieiev also mentioned that Ukraine currently has an extremely developed structure of open data, which functions even in the face of ongoing war. This is extremely important for each country in terms of risk management (including national defense).
The last speaker of this panel of the Future is Data 2023 conference, which we will mention, Ott Velsberg, very transparently admitted that a few years ago Estonia was at the back of the Open Data Maturity classification.
-“In the early 2000s, we wanted to digitize absolutely everything, but the data itself was not seen as a source of value (as an asset), it was not shared,” he said. — ”They served as a means to the goal (to build). Today we treat data as a resource. We try to look at data comprehensively, throughout the entire data life cycle.”
This data lifecycle is a string:
Create and gather -> Quality and availibilty → Find and understand → Reuse
In accordance with this strategy, Estonia does not open up all the data “how’s it going” in order to make as much of it available as possible. When considering which data to open, the Estonian government considers what the data might be useful for. So the emphasis is on usability. Estonia is now investing heavily in AI and business collaboration, seeing huge potential in linguistic data.
II. What will the Data Act, which comes into force in autumn 2023, change?
The panel “Data Act main assumptions — access to private sector data by public sector bodies (B2G)”, led by Szymon Lewandowski from the European Commission, was very substantive.
S. Lewandowski explained that the Data Act is de facto a preparation for a new industrial wave — iOT, preparation for a new reality. This regulation defines the rules on which data are to be sent, to whom, and how to prevent a situation where large commercial platforms dictate conditions, blocking small business.
As a result, the Data Act focuses on three areas:
- The issue of contracts between entrepreneurs and unfair provisions in them (micro, small and medium-sized enterprises will gain protection)
- The issue of new regulations regarding cloud data (to protect against giants)
- The issue of B2G data sharing (sharing private sector data for the common good)
The latter issue, B2G data sharing, is quite a high-profile issue in the data market. As you know, the private sector is not always willing to share its data.
S. Lewandowski emphasized that the need to introduce B2G to the Data Act became obvious in the EU primarily during the COVID pandemic. During this period, many countries and the EU lacked data to support public sector tasks and to respond quickly to critical situations, and there was no legal basis for governments to demand such data.
The Data Act identifies 3 exceptional B2G situations where the government may request access to data:
- When a quick public response is required,
- When data is necessary because there is a specific threat or a threat needs to be prevented,
- When data are necessary for the public interest and these data cannot be simply bought/purchased on the market.
III. When will B2G data sharing be paid for, and when will the government be able to use these resources for free?
In the first situation, when a quick public response is required, the data is to be made available to governments for free.
In situations 2 and 3 (i.e. in the event of a threat or social interest), entrepreneurs have the right to apply for payment.
IV. How to understand the Data Governance Act DGA?
The speakers of this panel of the Future is Data 2023 conference, Dominik Sybilski and Mikołaj Garstka from the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland, very clearly explained what will happen in Poland on September 24, 2023, when the Data Governance Act (DGA) will enter into force.
From the point of view of business and citizens, the most important change is the creation of a national information point that will:
- manage an electronic inventory of available data resources
- accept requests for re-use of protected data.
Will the helpdesk also process these applications? NO. This will be dealt with by the relevant entities and public sector entities.
The other thing that DGA brings to each European country is an official register of data altruism organizations.
It is for this reason that the Data Governance Act DGA introduces four new definitions that have been missing in the EU so far:
- definition of what data is (** this will be the first general definition of data, i.e. without an adjective! Earlier, less general definitions were introduced, e.g. sensitive data, high-value data)
- definition of what data sharing is,
- definition of what data sharing services are,
- definition of what data altruism is.
V. High value data over time — an interesting project “The use case observatory”
Finally, it is worth mentioning a great speech by Giuseppe Ascone Modica from the European Portal, who in the panel “High-value data and their possible use” talked about the project, which in our opinion is extremely necessary from the point of view of business and information providers, the so-called The Use Case Observatory.
It is a study of 30 specific cases of the use of open data and the development of their value in 4 dimensions: social, economic, environmental and governmental. It was initiated in 2022.
Importantly, the first 79-page report is now available to the public for free:
Access The Use Case Observatory’s high-value data report by going to the site:
The next edition of the report (use cases of the same 30 organizations after several months of operation) will appear in the first quarter of 2024.
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