France takes the lead in the global open data race

Three ways to success

In his recent report, Verdier listed three tangible results of the actions he and his team took during the first year on the job. The first was to reduce energy spending in the government by making predictions about energy needs and price changes.

The second was to predict when and where cars would be stolen so police officers could be deployed to neighbourhoods accordingly.

The third was to make predictions about which companies would be hiring and to pass that information to the French unemployment office.

While France is notoriously centralised both in government and in business, its progress in open data isn’t just coming from the top. On a local level, many French cities are enthusiastically reaching out to citizens and local enterprises by making the right data available. 

Deputy mayor in charge of the open data initiative for Grenoble, Laurence Comparat, said: “In Grenoble we take a bottom-up approach. First, we try to find out what data will be of interest by simply paying attention to what the local organisations are asking for. A lot of people are asking about financial data on government projects. We also get requests for maps, and for data on buses and tramways”.

“Once we know what the local players want, we then go out to the data sources, such as local corporations or research firms. We let the data producers and gathers know that there is demand for their data, and we encourage them to make the information available,” she added.

But, an area that still needs focus is cataloguing the data already in the government’s hands. And, Verdier said, because nobody knows exactly how much data is in the government’s possession, not only are we losing big opportunities to exploit what we have, we’re also duplicating work.

By way of example, Verdier said because a climate of sharing didn’t exist in the past, three different government departments did the same work of geolocalising house addresses.

Another example he gave is how ignorance of available data held up progress when an unnamed French city wanted to find out more about the hobbies of its citizens. A full year into its project, city officials discovered that local libraries were already in possession of the information it needed.

The city now uses data on which books are borrowed – and when – to discover the interests of its citizens, and even the times of year in which a given interest peaks. 

Verdier said he plans to focus on ways of reducing the occurrence of these kinds of errors.

A big thumbs up

The rest of the world is also hard at work in the same direction. Gartner analysts estimate that open data will quickly become a standard practice of governments. According to its recent report: “By 2018, more than 30% of digital government projects will treat any data as open data.” 

France seems to be on the right track for leadership, but how is Verdier’s work perceived in his own country, by local governments in France?

Comparat gives Verdier a thumbs up: “Whereas the data policies of the French government used to be very top down, now they are much more open, and data is more accessible”.

“The government now has a more coherent approach to open data. It used to be closed, now it’s more transparent. Things are working much better now. There is more collaboration,” she added.