Joint meeting of Public Bodies Working Group on Open Data and Open Data Liaison Officers Network

31 October 2017

In the spirit of open access week, a joint meeting of the Public Bodies Working Group and the network of Open Data Liaison Officers which has been recently established under the Open Data Strategy 2017-22 took place on Tuesday 24th October in Government Building. Some 70 public service officials from across a broad spectrum of organisations attended.

Fiona Morley Clarke from the Open Data Unit in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform gave an overview of the Open Data Initiative since its inception in 2014 as well as highlighting the key actions in the recently published Open Data Strategy 2017-2022.

Deirdre Lee, Derilinx gave a presentation on ‘Publishing Open Data’ and a number of Public Bodies gave presentations on Open Data activities within their respective organisations and the approaches that they have taken to date including Roscommon County Council and the Marine Institute.

Dominic Byrne, Fingal County Council spoke about the current work of the broader local authority sector which includes the development of a protocol for the publishing of Open Data datasets by all 31 Local Authorities to the data.localgov.ie site as well as the coordination of the publishing of Open Data datasets by all 31 Local Authorities which is a very welcome development.

The Houses of the Oireachtas Service gave a presentation on their soon to be launched website which will see data published openly by default which will enable and encourage reuse and innovation of their data by other stakeholders, whether State sector or civil society. The Oireachtas Service APIs are now available on the portal which allows their datasets to be retrieved and reused as widely as possible.

Presentation given on the day can be viewed here.

· Ireland’s Open Data Initiative and Open Data Strategy 2017-2022 – Fiona Morley Clarke

· Publishing Open Data – Deirdre Lee, Derilinx

· Roscommon Open Data – Barry Doyle, IS Project Leader, Roscommon County Council

· Local Government Open Data – Dominic Byrne, Fingal Co Co.

· Marine Institute Open Data Projects – Adam Leadbetter, Marine Institute

· Houses of the Oireachtas ‘Open Data Update’ – Stephen Rigney