As many of you may already know, on 19 November the British Government announced the publication of the database with detailed data of all public spending over £25,000 for the last six months. Well, we are once more really proud to say that Euroalert.net had the honour to assist to this event where the UK Government made such a relevant step towards transparency and open data, which also counted with the presence of some real VIP as renowned as Sir Tim Berners-Lee...Euroalert.net was kindly invited by the Open Knowledge Foundation to take part in this event organized within the framework of the Open Government Data Camp 2010, and had the opportunity to be part of this very special moment when sentences such as “we want to be the most open government of the world” were pronounced. We really feel very proud for it.
Besides, the nature of the data which have been released has also quite an important meaning for us, as they are very relevant data for Euroalert.net products and services in public procurement information, such as 10ders product reports on public procurement. Knowing exactly the data of companies which have received payments from British public departments and Government will allow Euroalert.net to offer more and better commercial intelligence services regarding public procurement market in the United Kingdom.
One of the most special moments was, without any doubt, when the case of a company which requested the opening of certain data regarding public procurement was mentioned to the audience; a case which, it seems, triggered Government's formal commitment to put this as a priority to become true by the beginning of year 2011. Without knowing so, Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude, was probably talking about Euroalert.net..., as we were the ones who took the case for mediation before the OPSI. This case was something we had the opportunity to talk about in detail at the PSI Meeting 2010 as was later referred at the blog Count Culture which gave some more elements about. You can have a look at some more details and materials we have released related to this case in our project ShowMeTheTenders. We are really glad to have contributed in some way to open these data and make them accessible in the near future.
We leave here for you this photo album of an event where we made one more step towards Euroalert.net objective to build up a pan-European platform for information services on public procurement which will help us to offer you more useful services for SMEs all around Europe.
If you want to have a more personal vision of how was the OGDCamp, you can also read the post published by our CEO in his personal blog, and also have a look at the Twitter hashtags #ogdCamp and #openUK.
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