 Mme la Vise Présidente, Monsieur le Directeur Général, chère Graham Tellor, Docteur Monsieur le chef Économiste, Mesdames et Messieurs, First of all, when we talk about participating in the open forum, you offered me a 2 hours speech in French or in half an hour speech in English. I choose the half hour speech in English but I'm not sure that you won in the process. And I'm sure that you are going to enjoy during it my French accent along and I have a lot of fun. Internet and its applications have jolted our old democracies calling for their renewal. Ignoring the reality of digital networks of their new phone walls and might would disconnect governments from new from the deep evolution of our societies. We must tend to the permanent adaptation of our states and their structures to this worldwide revolution. Millenia of gradual but relentless technological progress prepared the rise of the new information economy. Internet assured in an area of instant global connectivity of universal access to knowledge of accelerating information flows enabling new applications and behaviors. Internet is the root of a historical turning point. It removed traditional knowledge intermediaries. It transformed how we relate to information and public debate. It brought height and expectation of transparency to our paper based societies. Online communities now heavily contribute to the expression of the democracy. Today it is our social network that relays and recommends approves or disapproves of information. Through this virtual intimacy networked individuals collectively reclaim their role as opinion leaders. This was made blindingly obvious with the recent Arab Springs. Facebook, Twitter, Dailymotion, YouTube relayed a popular revolt and these networks gave an unprecedented echo to this powerful aspiration the group of eight described as a legitimate call for democratic open societies. Inside the European Union itself the recent referendum vote in Italy was largely determined by Internet. You summed this up with a bold vision three months ago Madame Lavise Président. The Internet will change our world. Europe needs to connect to this force of change. Of course this evolution did upset traditional models and social economic models and social norms. New online behaviors and the issues they raise prompted us to reaffirm the rule of law and the fundamental values of our societies. France's un yielding commitment to freedom of information and freedom of speech. The protection of privacy and personal data. The protection of individuals especially of children. The protection of intellectual property is un wavering. This was front and center. This past May on the agenda of the EG8 forum which Président Sarkozy had called for. However we must not lose sight of the funding principles of Internet. Decentralize production of information, collaborative and open governments freedom to create and innovate. Tradition and organization of states has actually too often collédit with the open, horizontal and decentralized architecture of the digital society. Internet has strengthened the expectation of transparency that citizens rightly demand from their elected leaders and we must embrace it and from my standpoint there is no coming back as just said President Sarkozy. To meet this renewed expectations government must rethink its structures and its missions. It must endeavor to find a new model better suited to our times a more open, a more transparent, a more collaborative governance. A democracy that stands still is a democracy that stands to fall. Failing to renew the trust citizens place in our institutions would pave the way for populism and extremism of all kinds at a time of great challenges. France measures the importance of public data reused by the yardstick of this historical turning point. And we have embarked on an ambitious open data policy as have the United States, Great Britain, Nigel Chatbot was here to exchange about it last year and the other European countries from Spain to Greece and Denmark or our Norwegian neighbors. President Obama reaffirmed this week that the strongest foundation for human progress lies in open economies, open societies and open governments. Open data will grant citizens access to core information on our nations from public finances to the quality of our air and the performance of our jobs market. The decision to open public data will generate substantial saving for public finances by enabling private initiative to develop the services that government has yet to create. And because transparency increases the accountability of our public services. Direct evaluation by citizens help reinforce governments efficiency and effectiveness. It opens a conversation between public bodies and the citizens to which they are of course accountable. Transparency does not imply finger pointing rather it means seeking improvement through constructive criticism accepting it, preparing for it, learning from it. Openness focuses efforts and precise measurement enables lasting progress, transparency reinforces the trust in which we hold our public institutions. Access to public data helps bring government closer to citizens. It sheds light on the accomplishments or our public services and civil servants. Open data can also nourish and reshape public debate. Remove it from the shaky grounds of ideology. Rebuild it on the solid foundations of informed analysis. Root everyone's choices in the virtuous circle of objective established facts. Universal access to information furthermore helps promote equal opportunities for all. But as essential as it may be renewing this trust for reinforced transparency is more than a democratic imperative. Returns to transparency are also economic in nature. Prime Minister Fillon reaffirme last week that broadening free access to data helped by the government, strengths entrepreneurs trust in public institutions and a social factor of economic development. Trust in our institutions, confidence in our nation's economic outlook face in the stability of our public finances. These are the key elements of economic growth granting broad access to government economic budgetary and financial information reinforces the confidence of investors. These efforts if I may should be not exclusive to the public sector. Access to corporate information is an element of economic transparent democracy. A customer will better trust a company if he knows it financials, adapters, its suppliers, the quality of its product or the ecological footprint of its operations. Regulation food disclosure can inform consumer choices. This is highly relevant for online and digital services. Data portability could help users discover which personal data is collected about them, correct or erase information linked to their accounts or transfer them to other competing services. This openness would streamline economy exchanges and spur competition, improve quality of service for all. Public as well as private transparency encourages entrepreneurs to take bold risks to create the new models which will power our growth. Against the advocates of no growth economics, we believe in growth stemming from openness, from innovation, from entrepreneurship. Easy and free use of open government data is important for the competitiveness of Europe's businesses. It opens new fields of possibilities with no limit other than human genius. The creative potential embodied in public data hinges on its re-users, developers, entrepreneurs and startup founders. Eventing a second life for public data will fuel the rise of new online services, new innovative products, new useful applications that benefit to everyone. Sustainance of data has considerably improved this past few years and information rules, as Dr. Alvarion wrote, algorithm and their applications play a central role in the information society and the digital economy. Opening government data will feed new semantic web technologies and has turned the coming of Internet's future. Beyond the digital economy, open data can support scientific research. Scientific biology or studies on the medical impact of chemicals builds to a large extent on shared experiment data and results. Sustainable development and the resilience of our societies must largely benefit from the applications built on open data. Multimodal information could spur smart transportation usage. Access to precise geophysical data could catalyse the development of clean energy. Public data mashed up with real-time information, crowdsourced by citizens, already helps coordinate relief efforts during natural catastrophes. My conviction is that opening public data is a democratic imperative at the root of an economic virtuous circle. Its economic model must be broad access and free reuse. It is, of course, time to rethink the model of data as an asset to be monetized. For too long, it was thought that using public data, its potential meant selling it. That the first step to maximize its values was to shield, to limit, and to exclude. It is nevertheless reuse and reuse alone that gives value to data. What truly matters is not what it is, but what it is done with it, what citizens and what entrepreneurs built and invent with it. Public data reuse is thought to be a potent market. According to the commission, Madame Naviste Président, it could reach tens of billions of euros every years. But projects would be much higher if we tore down artificial roadblocks that bridle data reuse and thus innovation. The real impact of open data will be structural and systemic. Its success won't be measured by the amount raised by the charging schemes nor by additional tax revenue stemming from new public data reuse. Its true measure is that the practical benefit society will draw from its applications. In order for this wealth of new services to bloom and provide useful practical benefits to Europe's citizens, member states must exercise careful stewardship of data, this essential facility of the digital economy. They must see that it be no captured. Neither by the private sector, which could create the conditions of de facto exclusivity, nor by the public sector, which could open its data under discriminatory and monopolistic conditions. A model where most of all data production cost would be borne by its re-users is akin to a monopoly. For a given administration is frequently the only entity able to produce certain data sets which it collects to conduct the public services it's interested with. This model is of course highly inefficient for society. Economic science leaves no doubt about it in order to maximum social welfare prices must match marginal cost of supply, meaning essentially zero in the case of data, a public non-hyvel, non-excludable good, infinitely reproductible at no cost. Not only the free reuse principle more efficient from an economic and social standpoint, it also leads to more efficient public management, potential revenue shortfalls stemming from a switch to free reuse can be compensated several times over by the savings such a switch enables. Above all, no other model than free reuse could be understood if one keeps in mind that public data production is financed by taxpayers as an instrument of byproduct of public services. The economic models of public services, some of which rely on charging for data reuse should not be jeopardized when they are based unnecessary trade-offs. I think about the case of culture or the necessary independence of national statistics bodies, the financial means of which we must be interested to them. We are all attached to the quality of this public services and especially in France, as you know. A charging scheme for data reuse when a public body provide a specific service requiring a special investment should not be forbidden, but it must stay the lonely exception rather than the rule. The benefits which society can draw from diffusion and reuse of public data sets hinge, however, on the ability of citizens and businesses to invent new users for them. The new economy, the models of which are often still under construction, is built on the notion of discovery. Young, inexperienced, literally excluded from their universities, the founders of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, as at their start, no other asset than their knowledge and their ideas and their unyielding will to put them to the test. If, before even starting to work on their products, they had had to gather thousands and thousands of dollars on the strengths of their ideas alone, they would have failed. And millions of highly qualified jobs would not exist today. Let alone the transformative impact this free example have had on society and the economy. It is up to governments to embrace this paradigm shift and to evolve accordingly. Democracies must open their data and must choose a model of broad access to and free reuse of public data as widely as possible. This is the model chosen by all the countries which have opened their public data to date. Sheltering economic models built on direct monetisation by the public sector could hurt European companies. It may tilt the playing field in their international competition against fast growing companies from countries that have embraced free reuse. We have adopted a principle for public sector information reuse, broad access and free reuse as widely as possible. And the Prime Minister sent an executive order to that effect on May 26 to all ministers of the French government. A decree which he released on the same day now strictly restrained the possibility of creating any new charging scheme for that I reuse. While still possible, such schemes can now be created only under exceptional circumstances. All charging schemes that exist to date will be listed and published transparently online. In a few months' time, everyone will be able to know precisely the amount and the object of these charging schemes. Since February 21 this year, I have had the honour of heading under the Prime Minister's authority the mission tasked with enabling open data in France and coordinating online publication of government data from all ministerial departments Etala builds data that groove.fr, the French Open Data Platform. Since then, one coordinator has been appointed in each and every ministerial department in order to collect and publish government data this department hold. A lot rests on this high level civil servants for a pragmatic approach is needed to fulfill our goal to publish data as excessively as possible in raw and machine readable formats. During August's last Council of Ministers, Valérie Pécresse, the French Government Spokesman, reminded all ministers of the importance of public data and called the administration under their direction to generalise the use of free and open formats so as the encouraged public data reuse. I have chosen, what else, an open, transparent and collaborative governments for Etala. Online publication of open government data is a public service which can find meaning only in an exchange with the community of developers and entrepreneurs in a relationship based on mutual trust and, of course, openness. I organised a first open steering committee this past June, which was open to all and gathered 200 attendees. Its goal was to present the technical partners who collaborate to the development of the French platform to report on the data collection process and to explain the framework created by the Prime Minister's Executive Order, under which ministerial departments collect and publish their data. My aim is to make Data.gov perpétually and steadily improve to meet the expectations of data producers and re-users. We organised a frequent workshop open to all. The first workshop allowed us to leverage the community's expertise to generate new ideas on the platform's user's experience and its collaborations models. The third workshop gathered representatives on ongoing open data initiatives locally and abroad. Generally speaking, we seek inspiration from other states who have launched open data programmes abroad and have adopted the methods of start-up for new product development. Among the themes of upcoming workshop, we will focus on data journalism and the application of data visualisations techniques to digital media and online press. We will organise the last workshop of the year in December at the web conference in Paris. The open data platform for France will be released on the first week of December as a first beta version. It will then evolve in somehow a perpetual beta with continuous incremental interactions, always gathering early feedback from the community all along the way. A long-term vision is that Data.gov should eventually become a real semantic data store. Publishing PSI in raw open machine readable format is a first step towards linked open data and we've adopted the principle of agile development in order to start off the development of Data.gov on the basis of a simple first version which will be frequently updated through successive iteration. The platform must tend toward an efficient application for data supply which lowers the barriers to experimentation for the actors of innovation. We focus our efforts and those of the administrations on raw machine readable, numerical and structured data. Free and open formats will make it easily reusable to encourage new applications. We are at this very moment coordinating the work of all government administrations in order to collect datasets that will be listed on Data.gov when it launches on the first week of December. All datasets that are collected will be listed online because restricting open data to only those datasets deemed interesting could cause one to forgo opportunities to enable the development of useful applications. Publishing data online by default to the largest extent possible is crucial for this whole comparison and combination that researchers can gain knowledge and developers invent new applications. History testifies to this. It is thanks to what could go down in history at the first mashup, a super position of cholera outbreak points over a map of water pumps in London in 1844 that a British medical doctor discovered it is a water born dizzy. I believe in this case in the account of randomness and contingency and in the serentipid use discovery. Selecting data based on how profitable we imagine its reuse to be would be a major roadblock to other less predictable but potentially even more useful applications. Lowering barriers to data reuse also means creating conditions of legal safety for producers and re-users and I have chosen to offer all data re-users a free open interoperable license. We have conducting since this past June a consultation with all stakeholders from the private as well as the public sector and the French license will be published in the next few days. We have made a point to establish a license that is compatible with the United Kingdom's open government license and the open data commons by license. It will encourage all types of public data reuse commercial and non-commercial alike. It will provide re-users with all the rights and the reassurances needed to spark their innovation and their creativity. Voilà mesdames, messieurs. The main points I wanted to share with you today. Sorry that I have been a bit long. This is why open data has emerged as a powerful policy instrument in the hands of society and elected leaders who will play a role in meeting tomorrow's overarching challenges from facing climate change, regulating the international financial system and igniting sustainable development. This is why broad access to and free reuse of public data will contribute to the renewal of our democracies and the growth of our economies. Thank you very much.