France has been making this bet for several years on the opening of public data. In France, an important milestone was reached with the adoption of the Law for a Digital Republic on October 7, 2016, which provides for the free availability of certain public sector data.
Many local authorities are now opening their datasets concerning public services, budget, urban planning, cultural life, etc.
The administrations themselves benefit greatly from the advantages of open data, since thanks to the exchange of data and the analysis tools made available to them, feedback is systematized and facilitated. They can thus access a more detailed and personalized knowledge of users' needs, which allows them to better fulfill their public service mission.
data.gouv.fr: more than 600,000 consultations and nearly 5 million page views per month
At the end of October, the open public data platform data.gouv.fr had more than 39,000 data sets and 206,344 resources made available by more than 2,379 organizations. They gave rise to 1,938 reuses.
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For the past two years, use of the data.gouv.fr platform has been steadily increasing, reaching 612,866 visits in October 2019 alone, representing 4,829,616 page views (including 3,589,180 unique page views) and 226,018 downloads (including 176,658 unique downloads).
In two years, the number of active contributors has risen from 23,000 to 44,700 (an increase of 62%).
As for monthly visits, their number has increased by 140% in two years.
Ministry of Finance releases full property data
The DVF database (requests for property values) produced by the Direction générale des finances publiques (DGFiP) is now available in open data. It contains all the information - price or description of property, etc.. - It contains all the information - price or description of the property, etc. - declared at the time of real estate transfers for valuable consideration (sales or auctions in particular). It allows everyone to know the real prices of transactions and specialized operators to offer tools to evaluate a property to buy or sell. This database gives access to the sale price and the date of transaction (of a built or unbuilt property), to the description of the property (number of rooms, surface area, lot number, etc.) and the geolocation.
The DVF database is the most viewed dataset on Data.gouv.fr, ahead of the National Directory of Associations (Ministry of the Interior) and the Sirene database of companies and establishments (Insee).
460 local authorities committed to open public data
According to the OpenDataFrance Territorial Open Data Observatory, in October 2019, 460 local authorities published open data, an increase of 34% in one year for all local authorities (including 54% for EPCIs).
The opening up of the market concerns, first and foremost, metropolises and large cities and 12 of the 13 regions of metropolitan France. To date, 50% of the departments have taken steps to open up the market.
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97 communities (71%) publish data on a dedicated portal, 31 (22.6%) on the Geoportal and 9 (6.6%) on the community's website. This last option is quite valid as long as the data are properly documented (metadata) and easy to find.
The Territorial Open Data Observatory provides detailed information on the governance of the 171 territorial platforms (shared or dedicated), on the frequency of updating published datasets, on delays in updating data, on the licenses used (43% of local authorities have opted for the open license).
Visualizations reach more people than raw data
On April 24, 2019, the Directorate General of Public Finance opened and put online the DVF database ("Demande de valeur foncière"). In order for this DVF database ("Demande de valeur foncière") to be visualized on a map without the need to download or manipulate them, the Etalab mission has developed a web application : app.dvf.etalab.gouv.fr.
The etalab Mission draws, on its blog, a series of lessons from this achievement and success it has encountered.
- Visualizations reach more people than raw data
- Configuring a server is never a bad idea
- Documenting is not a waste of time
- Gathering feedback helps improve the user experience
- Making the code public makes it better
- Criticism is part of the game
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France among the leading countries
Several international rankings confirm France's position as a leader in open public data.
France is in second place (behind South Korea) among OECD countries, according to the OURData index which takes into account the availability, accessibility, quality of data and public support for their reuse.
It ranks 3rd, behind Japan and Korea, on Pillar 1 of the " data availability " criterion (which combines " content of the default openness policy" and "stakeholder involvement in data disclosure").
In second place (behind Austria) for the Pillar 2 criterion " availability of data ", which combines " content of the policy of openness by default", "association of stakeholders for the quality and completeness of data", "content of the policy of unrestricted access to data ".
In sixth place for the criterion "Government support for data reuse ", which combines "impact monitoring", "data familiarization programs within the administration") and "initiatives and partnerships to promote data").
The comparative study commissioned by the European Commission on the maturity of open data in the various member states (Open Data Maturity in Europe 2018), placed France in third place in 2018 (with a maturity assessed at 83%), after Ireland (88%) and Spain (87%).
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New questions, new issues
According to Dominique Cardon, in his book on Digital Culture, " the hopes raised in 2007 by the observation of the under-utilization of so-called raw data were undoubtedly a bit naive. In practice, the exploitation of the first open data has above all brought to light new questions and new issues".
On the side of citizen use, first of all, "we note that it is difficult to get administrative data to talk, since, in order to respect the privacy of individuals, it is impossible to work with complete nominative files and data must be aggregated. Even if their recent opening has triggered journalistic investigations, for example on the allocation of funds from the parliamentary reserve and on the declarations of assets of elected officials. In fact, data journalism has moved towards a completely different use of public data, consisting of producing rankings in a logic of practical services rendered to the public: rankings of the best schools or universities, regions where it is good to live, mapping of neighborhoods according to crime, etc. The intention is not to make a profit from the data, but to make it available to the public. The intention is not to identify facts of general interest, but rather to provide a specific service to each citizen. Is the property value of my street increasing? Is the cleaning service in my community effective? Are the schools in my neighborhood performing well?
On the economic side, "we quickly realized that the idea of raw data was a fiction. Data are not natural entities that need to be extracted from the clutches of their owners so that they can reveal their value on the markets. All data is linked to a particular production context, it is part of a specific processing chain, in a metrology designed to make it produce this or that type of signal. Once freed from its context in order to be examined in another, the raw data may no longer be interpretable".
In an opinion piece, some twenty actors in the field of open public data (including Danièle Bourcier, director of research at the CNRS, Christian Quest, founder of Opendatarchives and Bertrand Gervais, co-founder of Handimap) call for an acceleration of the opening of public data. "Despite the political will demonstrated by France in this field for several years, questions have recently arisen about the operational constraints but also, more worryingly, about the very scope of Open Data. Even if some of these questions may be legitimate, this movement of withdrawal makes us fear a slowdown in the implementation of openness in certain sectors, which could eventually limit the benefits of Open Data, to the detriment of citizens.
The Court of Auditors had called on the government to clarify the doctrine of the State in terms of data but also the conditions of application of the rules on the opening of data. In a mail to the First President of the Cour des Comptes, the Prime Minister announced on March 4 that the reuse of data would be made free of charge by 2022 at the latest: "The decision to make data completely free of charge by 2022 will effectively simplify the issue of the use of licenses insofar as it will make it possible to free oneself from the existing dual licenses (paying or free with an obligation to share), thus facilitating the transition to an open license. Specific licenses, which restrict the possibilities of re-use of data, should only be used in very exceptional cases and duly justified.
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Towards a digital mediation around data
For Dominique Cardon, "freeing up data is not enough. We also need to support their reusers, to "curate" the data, to explain the conditions of registration and the categories of classification. Etalab's platform contributes to this: by offering associations and companies the possibility of registering databases alongside administrative data, it creates a space for dialogue and for animating the community of reusers.
This is what is at stake in digital data mediation approaches, such as the Infolabs approach.
