 Mae'n gweithio y gallwn, mae'n golygu'r un o'r ddweud y ffordd yma, sef yw'r ffeicio'r holl, a phabio'r holl hefyd am y tro yma, ond mae'n gweithio'r holl, ac mae'n gweithio'r holl, ond mae'n gweithio'r holl yn gyflawni'n ddweud yma. Rwyf wedi cael ei gwaith. Rwyf wedi bod yn ddweud i chi'n ddweud i'r llwydd honno arweinydd. Rwyf wedi bod y mae'n ddechrau yn y biografff, sydd hwn yn gwahod i gael, yn y gallu gyfrifoedd Ngwysgrifol i'r unrhyw gyrfa arall, yn llaw i'r rhai, that also interesting fact, she's been to Timbuktu, to English people, Timbuktu is the middle of nowhere you know, it's the word, the phrase that embodies that, but then we tried to find out the same idea in other European languages and we didn't get very far last night, but she's sort of been to Timbuktu in another respect, ..rydych chi'n fewn arwyio i Albanianiaeth, pan oeddw i ddim yn flwynt oes yn gwybod. O'n digwydd, mae'n plwynt o'r DWG Wrth gwrs honno i Albanianiaeth... ..cynny'n bod ni'n cynnyddio i Albaniaeth na'r hyn yn hynny. Felly, rydych chi'n trei'n cymd Garthyn i'r yw Llyfrod... ..ac yn gyfrithiau yma. Helen, dd experience. Roesan ar gyfnod. Roedden ni'n meddwl gyda ddweud gyda dweud... ..au'r Albanianiaeth. Felly, wrth chi'n meddwl gyda'r ddweud mor iawn. I'm glad you didn't tell them that I not only speak Albanian but always carry a knife, which is what I thought you were going to do. But that is also true, including on aeroplanes. I can tell you about that later if you want. OK. Thank you very much. I've got a few slides. I'm going to focus on three points. I'm going to talk about the right to information or data. I'm going to talk about how much transparency are we really talking about? Are we talking about total transparency? Do I have a little thing here, don't I? I'm going to look very briefly at the right to reuse, and I'm going to look at all three of these from a more human rights perspective. I have indeed been working on the right of the public's right of access to government information since the early 90s, and so I'm going to look at how do we get access to this data and what's our right to this data and what are the implications of that for the open data movement and for what many of you are trying to do. I have to say that sometimes I, listening to the introductory speeches this morning, having worked in this area for a long time, I have to kind of pinch myself and wonder if I'm really hearing what I'm hearing from the European Union, from the French government, perhaps a bit less so from the British government given the success of the Freedom of Information Act in recent years, but it is truly remarkable what's happening. Maybe I am slightly dreaming, or we all are perhaps, but that's not a bad thing necessarily, but the kind of values, the recognition of the values of opening up public information that we heard from the opening speakers, the value for having empowered and engaged citizens, the value for business, for innovation, the benefits for science that nearly Crow has talked about, the potential increase in government efficiency through the feedback loop of the public looking at the way, well the turning off the lights is a perfect example, the incentives for government to be more efficient when they're under scrutiny. Was it Rousseau who said that we'll spend some, I don't know, more closely we'll watch the better we behave, but there are issues there as well in the sort of privacy and invasion surveillance societies that we're also walking into these days, but there is the benefits for government efficiency and the accountability that strengthens our democracies, reducing corruption, reducing decisions which are taken through particular interests rather than in the public good. So we know the justifications, this is what the freedom of information or right to information movement has achieved in the past couple of decades essentially, you'll see this huge growth in the number of laws recognising the right of access to information. That's very important because it shows that this is not simply the government's taking initiative to benefit from the internet to push information out, but citizens have been claiming this as a right. In Europe we have most countries having an access to information or freedom of information law. One of the reasons that my organisation Access Info Europe is based in Spain is because Spain is the largest country in Europe not to have such a law. Luxembourg doesn't have one and off the map Cyprus does not also have a Freedom of Information Act. There are other good reasons for being based in Spain but that's a nice justification for the funders. Italy, Austria and Ukraine are in a paler colour because their laws are weak. In fact since I made this map Ukraine has adopted a new law. Every year, and this is to let you know, next Wednesday is international right to no day. It's a day which is recognised now in many countries around the world. The UNESCO, the UNDP, information commissioners from around the world also celebrate and mark this day. So if you're thinking of doing something to promote open data, take the opportunity. And if you're in Brussels next Wednesday, come along in the morning, the European ombudsman is having an event on open... I think it's actually called what the EU can learn from others, which is a nice title. And they've invited someone from the American Embassy and I think one of the points of discussion will be the open government partnership, something that was launched this week in New York and we may want to talk about that a bit in the discussion. Access Info Europe will be launching a portal, AskTheEU.org, where you can file requests for information with the EU. It's currently a little bit difficult to find out where to go, we're going to make it a lot easier. This is based on my societies, what do they know for people from the UK or from people from Germany, the recently launched Fragdenstadt. So I'm talking about this as a right. Is this a right, a right to government information? Nilly Crow says something, she said, it's only natural that people should want access to information. It's only natural that public bodies who have collected information using taxpayers' money should give it back to their citizens. It's not only natural, it's a right. It's a right that's been recognised by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, by the European Court of Human Rights, by the United Nations Human Rights Committee and by many constitutions and constitutional courts around the world. The European Court of Human Rights said that when the information is held by monopolies, and this is very important when we're talking about public information, where the only source is the public body, and when the information is needed to exercise a right to freedom of expression, and we know from the other jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights that freedom of expression goes pretty wide and can include also commercial expression, if you like, then there is a right of access to that information. That right is very important when we're getting into a discussion about what kind of information should be made public. One of my concerns about the voluntary nature of the open government partnership, for example, is that it leaves it to governments to decide which information to release. That's fine. We should have a lot more proactive publication of information. We should have this presumption that everything's in the public domain, but we know that that's not always the case. We've been talking about Chris and his scraping of company's registers, for example. There is plenty of information of great public value which you can't get hold of right now, or you can't get hold of without paying a very large amount of money. I'll come back to the money question. Are we talking about total transparency? Are we talking about the WikiLeaks debacle where far too much information finally has been released? This frightens governments, and we have to recognise that. Who's the chap on the left, by the way? Does anybody know? Sorry? Guesses? No. Okay. Any Swedes here? You should know. He's Anders. Well, he's actually Finnish. Any Finns here? He's Anders Tudenius. He's the man who wrote the world's first Freedom of Information Act back in 1766. We all know who the gentleman on the right is. I would say, I am a great promoter of access to information, the right of access to information, but I recognise that there are legitimate exceptions. I'm not going to go into detail in this list, but this is a list from the Council of Europe's Treaty on Access to Official Documents, a treaty which is not yet in force. There are 11 groups of exceptions, things like national security, protecting the investigation and prosecution of criminal activities. These are taken from Europe's Freedom of Information laws and grouped into broadly acceptable categories. For countries which have a monarchy, there's also a 12th exception, which is correspondence with the king or queen. These exceptions can be applied narrowly. Assume the blue bubble is all the information and then you have the exceptions, but it can go like this or like that. This is the question. In different states, and what's the difference? It looks like this or like this. The first one's from Finland, a couple of words blacked out. The second one is from Denmark. To be fair on the Danes when we appealed, we did get more information. This information that we were requesting from these states is actually about a court case, Access Info Europe versus the Council of the European Union, which we won on the 22nd of March before the General Court of the European Union, but it's now gone, it's being appealed to the European Court of Justice. What were we trying to get information about? We were trying to get information from the Council of the European Union and about the reform of the EU's transparency rules. Ironically, they refused to go with this information about their transparency policy. They actually refused to tell us which countries were trying to put forward amendments to narrow the EU's access to documents rules. So we've got a lot of positive things happening, but we shouldn't forget that sometimes it's still very difficult to find out very basic information about decision making that could be used for citizens to engage in the decision making. The General Court of the European Union actually said that this information should be made public precisely for engagement and accountability. However, a number of countries have joined the Council in the appeal against this 22nd of March decision. They include Greece, the Czech Republic, Spain, and last but not least, Liam, the UK. So we've got the UK which is promoting, and the UK has been involved in this case against releasing this document from the outset. Admittedly, it was the old government that initiated the case. If there's any chance of getting the current government to pull out, that would be fantastic. Because I think it's an embarrassment for you. We have written to David Cameron about it. It's an embarrassment because it shows up something that I think is a real problem, which is the hypocrisy, although some people call it transparency washing, open data washing. And this is another of my concerns with the open government partnership that there are countries who have been invited to participate who really, in my view, do not qualify as open governments. In the European region I'll pick, for example, on Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan has a fantastic freedom of information law on paper. It also has bloggers in jail for exercising their right to freedom of expression. We need to be very clear when we're talking about open data and when we're commending governments for being more transparent, we have to be very clear is that on paper or is it in reality. And we have to look at the kind of promises that are being made and then measure them against what's actually delivered in practice. I think we've got some very, very good examples of data sets being opened up and that's really fantastic. But at the same time, when the information's sensitive, like discussions in the Council of the European Union, sometimes there's a battle to stop that information getting into the public domain. I'll keep you posted on what happens in that court case. My last point is whether or not we really have a right to reuse the information once we've got hold of it, once we've got access to it. And if so, what does that mean for some of the debates about open standards, about charging? I would say it's been established that there is a right of access and whether we say information or data or documents, I don't think it really matters. The National Definitions talk about any information recorded in any format. We don't make a distinction between paper documents and databases, or at least in this day and age we shouldn't. Any information, however it's stored, falls under the scope of the right of access. So we have this right and it's linked to freedom of expression, which means that not only can I take this information, be it one document or a whole database, but I should be able to do what I want with it. I shouldn't be constrained by licences or by fees, I believe. And this is where I do become rather radical in terms of the position I take. It's our information in the first place. It's information which has been created by people we elected to power to run governments for us and we pay with our taxpayers' money. So the information belongs to us. And apart from those very narrow exceptions, the information should be made available, certainly I believe free of charge. The problem is, and we've heard it mentioned this morning, is that the very economic model of some governmental or quasi-governmental agencies is based on selling the information. I talked to someone from the Hungarian mapping agency. He said if we had to give away information free of charge, we would close our doors tomorrow. That's a problem which politicians have to solve, but I think that problem has to be solved in the context of the discussion about the right of access to information. If information is not being generated as part of core government functions, what are our taxes paying to create? Why are we paying taxes to create it? So we need to look at that. I'm not going to go into the economic arguments in more detail than that, but there is a clash slightly between the rights-based perspective and the current possibility that's given to charge for data sets under the PSI directive. I'm not being rethought, and I welcome that. Finally, if the information belongs to us, then it really should be free of any constraints by intellectual property. I would use a rights-based argument to add to the pragmatic arguments for why copyright should be removed. I think there have been some discussions on the open data list recently about whether it should be only attribution or attribution and share alike, what's best for business. From my perspective, it just should be something that permits the greatest exercise of our freedom of expression, and even you get into arguments about whether there's a difference between, for example, NGOs or journalists using information and businesses using information. Personally, I don't see a difference. We're all citizens, we're all part of our societies. We all contributed to the creation of this information, and we should all have equal rights to access it and to use it. I'm going to leave it there. Thank you very much for your attention.