When Open Belgium saw first light, there were a lot of talks on Open Data evangelisation, show casing what it could bring to society and how it can help SMEs provide better or new value propositions. Thanks to the pioneering work of volunteers and civil servants, we can start talking on the next step, going from show cases to production ready re-use.

Open Data re-use is a hot topic but almost by definition, a complex task and local hackathons display this quite clearly. Students, volunteers, app companies who are building a handy app for their city find it hard to scale even across the city border, let alone another country. Because of the bottom-up approach, Open Data comes in many shapes, colors and sizes, making it hard to really adopt it on a grand scale.

This is actually a positive given, because we no longer have a mindset problem, we have a technical one and that’s what my talk “Open Data: what’s next” will be wrapping its head around. Joined by veteran and new players in the Open Data ecosystem, varying from government, start-up and scale-up we’ll talk about the approach of data re-use, the hurdles that come with it and the solutions that are being used.

A healthy mix of technology and policy aimed at one goal, leveraging Open Data and making the ecosystem more valuable. Next to a set of questions to which our panel will provide an answer too, we’ll make sure to leave some time for questions from the audience as well. Hope to see you there!