Opendata.fi took part in a two-day workshop organised by the European data portal in March. The theme of this workshop was open data quality indicators and the improvement of open data and metadata quality. During the workshop in Hamburg, we met with representatives of other European data portals and noted that almost all of us use the same CKAN platform for our portals.
CKAN is an open source platform meant for building and maintaining open data portals. Since many European countries use this same platform, it makes sense to share the developmental tasks within the member countries. This way each country participates in developing the platform and shares their work with the others instead of each country developing the same feature alone.
CKAN has been developed using version 2.7 of Python programming language. Technical support of this version ends at the end of 2019. This means that CKAN along with everyone using it has to migrate to a newer version of Python, which in turn means more work for the developers. Co-development will be useful with this as well – no one will have to deal with the massive migration alone. Instead, everyone will participate by doing a part of the tasks needed for a successful migration.
This sort of co-development between EU member countries’ open data portals has existed for a long time. However, during the workshop we agreed to an even more systematic and productive model of co-development. Additionally, we started working on a shared roadmap to CKAN development, and we have continued that work during the spring and summer. We are also planning on cooperating with the implementation of the EU directive on open data and the re-use of public sector information.
Co-development with other open data portals increases cost-efficiency and accelerates the development of the services significantly. Additionally, this kind of international co-development strengthens Finland’s position as a pioneer in public administration.