Euroalert.net mentioned by Expansión economic daily in an article about the industry created by open data

And the story goes on: In July it was the Spanish newspaper El País that mentioned Euroalert.net in an article about Open Data, and a couple of months later, in September, the economic daily newspaper Cinco Días cited Euroalert.net experience it its analysis about economic opportunities generated by the reuse of public sector information. Now, economic daily Expansión has also published on 18 October its contribution to clarify the real value of the business sector created by open data from public sector. Once again, Euroalert.net is highlighted as one of the pioneering companies in Spain when it comes to take advantage of these opportunities and create value added services for companies all around Europe.

The article entitled "Access to public data, a labyrinth close to solution" (access to PDF full Spanish version) from Mercedes Serraller, gathers the opinions from different parties involved in the Open Data movement in Spain, such as Rafael Rubio, Professor of Constitutional Law at the UCM (Madrid), Nagore de los Rios, director of the Basque Government portal Irekia, or Alvaro Furilo from Pro Bono Público Association.

As always, Euroalert.net is again really proud to be considered as a reference service in the industry and to be contributing as far as we can to spread the culture of reuse. Creating in Spain a culture for open data which will lead to the release of more sources of data and allow companies to create value and build new services, will with no doubt revitalise our economy by creating new opportunities for innovation. Euroalert.net will of course be there.

For Euroalert.net it is being really exciting to be part of this process which is also allowing our community to benefit from the best possible products and services. For that reason, Euroalert.net will keep on making contributions to all possible initiatives, either with our presence (as we did at the Governamental Linked Open Data session at the ICT 2010), by sharing our experiences (as it was the case at FICOD 09 or the PSI Meeting 2010), or by providing resources in initiatives such as ShowMeTheTenders or the release of our own data on public authorities.

We have an exciting challenge ahead and these mentions in so relevant media such as El País, Cinco Días or Expansión, are a good encouragement for Euroalert.net objective to gather business opportunities representing around 17% of EU's GDP in one single pan-European platform on public procurement to provide information services for companies all around the world.

Spending the day with Euroalert.net at the Open Days 2010

Today has been our first day at the Open Days 2010: the 8th European Week of Regions and Cities in Europe. We picked our badge this morning and start running from one workshop to the other, meeting old friends and making new ones.

One thing which has surprised us is the little activity there has been for the Open Days in Twitter today... Euroalert.net has really been one of the very few tweeting with the official hashtag #euopendays. We really felt alone in the conference rooms typing in our computer or our smartphone and somehow disappointed as we though that following others' tweets from other workshops would have enriched the debate... Here's a suggestion for making regions and cities even closer to the public at the Open Days, maybe for 9th edition!

We hope that at least those who follow Euroalert.net in Twitter will have enjoyed with our tweets from the conferences we attended.

Besides this "social media coverage", as we already announced you a couple of months ago Euroalert.net has been at some quite interesting workshops. We met the pre-commercial procurement people from DG Information Society and Media, for an interesting workshop on how public procurement can boost innovation also at regional level, shared some ideas on how to promote entrepreneurship and innovative business with start-up strategies, discussed over how to get public acceptance on controversial new energy technologies projects...

We also had the opportunity to meet our friends from the England's Northwest Brussels Office, from Fundación Comunidad Valenciana, from Stockholm Region, and also from a our own region, Castilla y León, at the exhibition area of the meeting place, and also unexpectedly meet with old friends at the Committee of the Regions lobby entrance!

He are looking forward to more interesting things tomorrow, and will be there telling you everything from the #euopendays. Are you joining us?

Spanish newspaper Cinco Días reviews economic opportunities of information reuse and turns its eyes towards Euroalert.net

Reached this point of year 2010, there is one thing which is quite clear by now: open data movement is a top value and it is here to stay. Throughout the whole year a lot of announcements have been made by administrations, businesses and citizen movements, which have all added efforts in order to make public sector information reuse to gain momentum. Today, it has been the case for the Spanish economic daily Cinco Días, which has published an article in its SME supplement making an overview of business opportunities brought by public open data in machine readable formats suitable for automatic processing (here you have a pdf version of the article – sorry, it is only available in Spanish).

In July, it was the newspaper El País who mentioned Euroalert.net as an example in its article about public open data, and now it is Cinco Días' turn to include Euroalert.net among the reference services regarding the creation of value from public sector information. We are really proud to be mentioned with companies such as LegalSolo or projects of great benefit to Catalan citizens as Rodalia.info, a group of excellent entrepreneurs with whom we share values and concerns. It was a real pleasure having the opportunity to meet them in person at the PSI Meeting 2010 organized by Project Aporta and ePSIplatform.

It is quite good news to know that not only Obama, Gordon Brown or David Cameron listened to the call from the web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee to flood the web with public data in order to create new products and services. Although Spain has still a long way to walk to reach the point of pioneer countries, the fact that financial newspapers show interest for the potential of the sector as a source of business opportunities, will certainly help to make improvements and maybe to create new political bets. For the moment we stick to two good examples of public initiatives mentioned in the article which have been put forward by the Government of the Basque Country (Open Data Euskadi) and the Government from the Principality of Asturias, as main Spanish references regarding public open data.

Once again, we really must thank you, all members of Euroalert.net community, for your daily support which is helping us to grow and gain relevance in on-line information about the European Union for companies and institutions. But above all, this recognition gives us more support to keep on working with even more determination in order for Euroalert.net to create the first pan-European platform for information services in international public procurement.

Euroalert.net will be at the Governamental Linked Open Data networking session at the ICT 2010

During the last week of September Euroalert.net will be at the "ICT2010: Digitally Driven" event, just the week before our next visit to Brussels for the Open Days 2010. Further to covering for all of you the most important European event for ICT research and innovation, Euroalert.net will be very specially present at the Networking session on Governmental Linked Data taking place on 28 September.

This will be the occasion for us to meet some of the members of the Open Data community we only know “digitally” for the moment, through the intense communication and collaboration we have been sharing over the past months. Besides “devirtualising” some people like Jonathan Gray from the OKFN, we will also meet some old friends like Jose Manual Alonso from Fundación CTIC.

As all of you know well, Euroalert.net has been trying to do its bit in the development of open data and the reuse of public sector information by participating in some major events related to it such as FICOD 2009 or by taking part in the PSI Meeting 2010. Euroalert.net keeps close contact with the most relevant actors within the Open Data community in Europe and is devoting an important share of time and resources to encourage the release of data in our area of activity and expertise: public procurement. As a contribution to the community, we document and release these experiences through the project Showmethetenders.net, open to collaboration from any stakeholder and interested party.

We are sure that the networking session at the ICT 2010 will be a quite valuable opportunity to learn from other experiences which are being developed in almost every corner in Europe. It will also be the occasion to meet people whose vision will help us to develop services more and more useful for the whole Euroalert.net comunity.

As for the 10,000 squere meters of exhibition and the three days of conferences, keep an eye on Euroalert.net Twitter account and to our web, we will bring you the most interesting things we see during the three days of the ICT 2010. For those of you who can't make it to be in Brussels, the hash-tag for the event will be #ict2010eu. And don't forget you can still register for the event if you are able to come to Brussels. Will be great to meet you there!

"Different and curious" Public Contracts of Euroalert.net that are Mentioned on the Article of El País

As all of those who follow us are already aware of, Euroalert.net tries to be very active in the public sector information reuse community in Europe. This is something that has been shown several times on the forums Euroalert.net has attended to talk about its experience in creating value from European public contract information.

For this reason, now, when one of Spain's national newspapers of biggest daily circulation like El País, echoes this phenomenon of Public Administration releasing public data and mentions Euroalert.net among the private initiatives dedicated to give it added value, we really feel very proud because of the recognition. Naiara Galarraga's article talks about the situation of the movement that pursues open data as part of the Open Government initiatives and cites opinions of relevant Spanish people like Alberto Ortiz de Zárate form Basque Government, Jose Manuel Alonso from CTIC Foundation, Aitor García from Asociación Pro Bono Público or Sebastián Muriel General Manager at Red.es, among many others. We had the opportunity to share with them the PSI Meeting 2010 that got European Open Data Community together in Madrid, called by Proyecto Aporta and ePSIPlatform.

So, with the same spirit of free information and data access, and due to the wave of emails received asking us to told them which were the calls for tenders mentioned by the article of El País, here you have a "public contracts' appetizer", some funny and others curious:

• Curious, for instance, is the call for tenders for the supply of berets to the French Army (up to now we don't know who has wined it and which is the total amount, so you will have to pay attention to Euroalert.net ;-)...)
• What is the purpose of the Danish Maersk Oil company with the publication of a public tender about Christmas tree supply is something we really don't know... The question is that not any thing is a Christmas tree..., it seems that the cpv was not right this time, or maybe is that the well-heads are to "decorate" the tree...?
• The UK Government Department for International Development awarded four contracts of supply of condoms to support a cooperation and prevention HIV contagion Program.
• And the jewel of the crown, the contract with the highest value: the award of a contract with a value of 3,359,928,000 GBP by Highways Agency, for hiring of construction works of highways and roads in the UK.

As you all know, more interesting contracts, more business and more opportunities in public tenders market in the European Union, always on the Call for tenders section on Euroalert.net.

Euroalert.net will be again at the Open Days 2010!

Everything is ready! This year we will be also in Brussels to live the 8th European Week of the Regions and Cities, also named the Open Days 2010. The events will be from 4th to 7th October this year and they will be developed under the title “Europe 2020: Competitiveness, co-operation and cohesion for all the regions".

As you could already read on Euroalert.net a couple of weeks ago, registration is now open and the deadline will be on 22nd September, so you can register to any of the 130 events that will take place on the first week of October. Although the organizers, DG REGIO and Committee of the Regions, have estimated to welcome about 6,000 people, you should better register on the events you are interested in asap, vacancies will be covered quickly!

As you know, Euroalert.net follows very close the biggest event of European regions and cities, as we already did in 2006 and in 2008, because this is a great chance to know first-hand what is done all around Europe. The experience of Euroalert.net staff at the Open Days 2009 was really good, because we had the opportunity to attend some very interesting events, like B-Creative, or "Restoring Growth through innovation" within Open Days University. Besides, we also had the opportunity to know a lot of people and exchanging experiences with them.

This year, we will also try to attend the events organized and promoted by members of Euroalert.net community as we did last year at the reception of North East England Office in Brussels, or at the Stockholm Region offices opening. Hope to see you all at the Open Days 2010 in October!

Euroalert participates in PSI Meeting 2010 with the European open data community

As those of you who follow our Twitter channel already know, and as we announced on this blog a while ago, on June 9th we participated in the PSI Meeting 2010. We were gently invited by the organizers, the Aporta project and ePSIPlatform of the European Commission. It was a very interesting event in which we could increase our knowledge and share our experience with reuse of public sector information.

The day was mostly a discussion meeting on PSI reuse from their different perspectives: on its future, its challenges and changes that society and governments should take for their proper development. Our director, Jose Luis Marín, participated as a speaker at the second of the four round tables, sharing Euroalert's experience together with other companies that have also managed to create business models by adding value to data released by the public sector.

We also took this opportunity to announce the launch of our project showmethetenders.net where we collect the successes and failures of Euroalert in several European Union countries while trying to unlock public data on EU tenders. As you know, we are making a considerable effort, to which we invite you to join us, to try to collect this information, primarily available in Official Journals and procurement platforms in reusable formats. By the moment, we have had considerable successes in countries like Ireland and Belgium, where we have had the responsiveness of those responsible: we really appreciate their support and commitment to the community for the reuse of public sector information.

But we have also had very much-talked-about failures like the one that Chris Taggart has nicely described, due to the situation that occurs in the UK about the outsourcing of the management of public data. In these cases, the release of data which are public but managed by private companies with their own economic interests gets complicated, and only strong political support can provide a solution to this issue.

We've also included some very shocking cases as the Spanish Government Procurement Platform or the European Commission itself through the EuropeAid Cooperation Office, which has denied the release of the datasets contracts for development aid!!! Their reasons for this refusal, furthermore, are not strong at all, and of course especially in the latter case it is not consistent at all that the European Commission itself does not bet on leading by being an example in the implementation of the Directive. Especially considering that it is not feasible for small businesses or start-ups to embark on legal proceedings to try to defend a more open position and in line with the Directive, which it seems that can only be obtained when there is a political commitment.

Over 19 addresses of relevant experts coming from public governments (including the European Commission) and platforms, companies that reuse information and trade associations representing their interests and civil society organizations, the main issues, perspectives and initiatives in the world of Open Data were reaped.

First names of the world of open data, such as Javier Hernández Ros, Head of Unit of Access to Information of the European Commission, Chris Taggart, a member of the working group of the Open Knowledge Foundation dedicated to the opening of public sector information in the United Kingdom, Alberto Ortiz de Zárate, director of the service of Citizen's Attention of the Basque Government, from Open Data Euskadi, or Daniel Dietrich, president of the German nonprofit organization Open Data Network, participated in the four round tables.

Thanks to all who attended, those who see the event by the streaming, those who interacted and followed through Twitter contributions... Thank you once again because we can demonstrate that by sharing information and knowledge we all get further.