Motion - Innovation and Agility with Open Data

The City Council of Enschede, meeting on Monday 14 March 2011,

Noting that: the City attaches importance to the active participation of its citizens, with their ideas, material

support and creative energy; the City wants to modernize itself using innovative technologies, as worded in the coalition

agreement; the City holds a large amount of data, the value of which could be enormously enhanced if they were

available as freely as possible as open data; the City already at the end of last year, as an experiment/pilot made datasets available (as part

of the open Hackathon Day), which resulted in two (demo)versions of applications; the Freedom of Information Act, the Database Act, the Copyright Law, and the Protection of

Personal Data Act, as well as relevant jurisprudence, normalize the active online publication of reusable information and data, and that the European Commission actively promotes acting according to that norm among its Member States,

Considering that: digital innovation can improve the communication with citizens, strengthens the City's image regarding

creativity and innovation, improves public services, allows citizens to organize and empower themselves, resulting in stronger participation, societal cohesion and civic pride;

if data is available freely, it allows citizens to use these data for diverse purposes, contributing that way to economic and sustainable activities in our City;

active online publication of reusable data in this way provides a positive, innovative and constructive impuls to all the City's policy areas, precisely at a time that budgets are under pressure,

Requests that Mayor and Aldermen subscribe to the following principle: “open and accessible data – data is public, unless..…” - the City will share freely with its citizens,

organizations and other public bodies, as much data as is feasible, maintaining the protection of personal data and national security, in reusable and machine readable form.

And also requests Mayor and Aldermen on that basis to: present a concrete action plan before 1 September 2011, which contains:- the immediate possibilities of publishing data more openly;- the indexing of available datasets, and online publication in a reusable way, using open

standards, interfaces and formats;- the guarantee that data collected by third parties (developers, contractors, external

advisors) are provided without license limitations, in regular open standards and formats, without copyright restrictions, unless this is necessary on the basis of other legal requirements;

start an active dialogue with willing parties about which data provides most easily for existing needs, and to use this dialogue as input for the above mentioned action plan;

as a symbol of everything mentioned above, declare Enschede as first in the Netherlands, an 'Open Data City' and undertake the following in support of that:

- As quickly as possible make available datasets in a separate section of the city's website (e.g. www.enschede.nl/data) and start with data where there are no obvious legal issues involved, which can be realized easily within the existing technical infrastructure, and require limited maintenance ;

- Organizing public actions around the theme 'Open Data City' that at the same time position the City as an innovative city that enjoys strong citizen participation;

- Organizing an 'Apps for Enschede' competition for citizens and developers, aimed at applications with as much societal value as possible;

- Enter into agreements with other (public) bodies, to share data with them, and encourage them to freely share their data with the public in reusable formats;

And resumes the order of the day.

PvdA, D66, CDA, SP, GroenLinks, VVD, Burgerbelangen