[rhl]

Hi Weddpros -- thanks for the feedback. As it turns out, we agree with you. That's why we've been working on a complete overhaul of http://data.gouv.fr to be soft-launched soon, and we think you'll like it!

If you've followed http://etalab.gouv.fr (mostly in French, sorry), you may have heard we launched an open and collaborative re-design process in the spring and summer, which lead to more than 60 substantial contributions and 9 events organized by our community of users throughout France.

We then brought in a team of hackers to work inside of government -- believe it or not, this is most likely the first instance of this in the French government; unsurprisingly it worked very well -- and redevelop the whole stack based off of CKAN.

Our code is live on http://www.github.com/etalab if you'd like to check it out. Stay tuned!

[mercurial]

As a French expat, congratulations. There are a lot of things I'm not happy about France, but the role of open source in the public IT policy is definitely something to be proud of. Keep up the good work and keep us posted.

Now, if Danish lawmakers would only take a hint...

[weddpros]

is there a hidden meaning ?

http://imgur.com/34ui71g

[weddpros]

It was a temporary bug, your github is back online.

Building on the OpenSource CKAN project is a good thing. Similarly, you should thrive to help people build on OpenData.

What really concerns me is the actual data that's made available, more than the technology used to serve it.

For the time being, it looks more like electronic document management than OpenData to me. The philosophy behind OpenData is not just "let's put office documents online", it should be more "let's see what they'll do with our data". Otherwise, where's the innovation? (except for the ideology)

[rhl]

Completely agree with the "let's see what they'll do with our data" philosophy!

The three stated objectives of France's open data policy are: 1. to make government more transparent and accountable, 2. to improve public policies and public service delivery, and 3. to enable entrepreneurs and civic innovators to develop create new services based on this data.

That's why we've brought together more than 30 key players in the French innovation ecosystem (VCs, angels, research institutions but also media, larger French corporations, Google, Microsoft etc.) and organized a series data-driven startup contests called DataConnexions.

You can check the best projects from the first 3 editions (from early 2012 onwards): http://www.etalab.gouv.fr/recherche/?query=dataconnexions

My personal favorite is an app developed jointly with the Greater Paris transport authority that uses context-based modeling to predict train occupancy levels at each time of the day, in real-time, taking into account any perturbation on the network and live feedback from users: http://tranquilien.com