bund.dev

Implementing the PSI Directive in 🇩🇪

– the civic tech way 😉

Hej, I'm Lilith, I'm a hacker and civic tech activist from Berlin.

Open Data in Germany on a federal level

– a bit of history

We want all data created by the government to be open and available to everyone. Without restrictions.

> 15 years ago

[S-5]

What we wanted…

We want the data to be structured and datasets linked with each other. We want linked open data.

> 10 years ago

[S-5]

What we wanted…

What we wanted…

Linked Open Data

[S-3][S-2]

covid numbers by city

geographic shapes

Berlin;250

Hamburg;400

…

<

What we got… (8 years ago)

[S-4]

🛑

🐌

What we got…

CSV

[S-6][S-7]

public domain.

Data licence Germany – attribution – version 2.0

What we got…

What we wanted…

Licensing

We want allsome data created by the government to be open and available to everyone. Without restrictions.

What we got…

We want thesome data to be structured and datasets linked with each other. We want linked open data.

What we got…

In 2019…

The PSI-Directive defines the concept of “High Value Dataset”, which includes information from different thematic topics and is expected to play an important role for the society and economy that have to be published completely freely and through the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in every member state. The availability of APIs stimulates the reuse, dissemination of dynamic data and increases business opportunities. Access to real-time and dynamic data is strongly promoted by the PSI directive, and once the directive will be fully transposed, member states have to publish dynamic open government data through APIs.

🥳

And the civic tech community…

2 years later…

🥳

And the civic tech community…

Data falling within the scope of this Act shall, as far as possible, be produced in accordance with the principle of ‘open by design and by default’.

– Section 1 (1)

This Act does not create an obligation to provide data or a right to access data

– Section 1 (2)

The thematic categories of high-value datasets, as referred to in Article 13(1) of the Directive, are:

2021

[S-0]

If the government would actually care about open APIs - what would they do?

Andi Scheuer, former Federal Minister for Transport and Digital Infrastructure

Doro Bär, former State Minister for Digitization at the Federal Chancellery

a few hours later…

Why dosen't the government do that?

it's better to ask forgiveness than permission

bund.de

✅ a few documented APIs

✅ a twitter account

✅ a github account to publish code and documentation

✅ a goverment-style landing page with really bad stock photos

one weekend later…

Over the last 4 months…

… we documented >30 APIS

… we grew to more than 50 contributors

… we started to build API monitoring solutions and api-bindings

… we weren't sued (yet) 

🥳?

federal agency for work

- rebuilt/renamed all their API endpoints

- protected some of their API endpoints with captchas

- they couldn't give us any (legal) reason why we shouldn't use their API

We implemented the PSI directive.

Not in the way it was intended… but…

We showed what's possible.

Doing what's necessary.

We need laws that actually obliges the government to provide open data.

We need to enable the public sector to be able to provide great APIs.

APIs are only the first step. We want open software. Linked open data, …