In the coming weeks, the EU will launch a tender for tech companies and freelance programmers to create an EU-wide online portal to allow access to government information and services. In a talk given at last week's Re:publica conference in Berlin, Carl-Christian Buhr, an advisor to Neelie Kroes, the EU's digital agenda commissioner, said that the project's aim is to change how European citizens interact with government on a range of levels to make government data, statistics and other figures, more easily accesible. The hope is that by making this data available, it will be easier for designers and data visualization specialists to "mash up" this data into mobile phone applications and interactive web pages. By allowing citizens access to government data and also to various parts of the civil service, energy consumption, agricultural subsidies and up-to-date public transport schedules are just some examples of the governmental realms Europeans could potentially be informed of and participate in. The "open government" movement is building momentum in many European countries and the European Commission is now taking steps to bring government information and services together in a one-stop online portal.
http://www.ejc.net/media_news/eu_to_launch_tender_for_open_data_portal1/
