Public Sector Information (PSI) has emerged as one of the most exiting issues for the next few years for developing new services using Internet technologies. According to a study by MEPSIR “Overall market size for public sector information in the European Union ranges from €10 to €48 billion, with a mean value around €27 billion”.

Several countries (USA, Canada, UK, France ...) have already decided to open up access to their public data. Many European regions (Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, Catalunya, Piemonte, Kent ....) and cities (Paris, London, Munich, Vienna ...) have launched their own initiatives in order to allow anyone to have access to their public data.

All these initiatives are expected to have a strong impact on issues such as:

Democracy: by giving people access to the results of public policies and operations,
Citizen life: by giving access to a wide range of services including transport, culture ...
Economy: by permitting organizations to develop innovative services as a result of mashups of data coming from different sources.

But a lot remains to be done:

Government administrations need to understand what is going on the next stage beyond launching a such initiative,
Some licenses exists but do they cover any situation? 
How to balance the opening of data regarding another trend that considers that public data are valuable on the market?
Do we have to define some limits? Is the frontier between private data and public data so clear? How can we deal with the differences of cultural approaches on this matter between Europe, America and Asia?  Are there some excesses we have to prevent?
How to harmonize access and the formats? Is this critical?
What is the real economic potential of PSI?

We invite you to come next 6th July 2011 to Marseille :

To explore and seek answers to these questions,
To share return on experiences,
To put forward proposals.