Data conference in Las Vegas (illustration data).

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SIPA

  • The city of Marseille is launching a one-stop shop and an open data platform.

  • A committee must meet every month to study the requests sent through a one-stop shop.

  • The Donut InfoLab association regrets the absence of citizens on this committee, and of explanations on the choice of whether or not to make data public.

The list of parks and gardens.

This is what the public data of the city of Marseille looked like a short time ago.

As it had committed, to "break with 25 years of opacity", the new municipality in place has initiated a shift in digital transparency.

A one-stop-shop is thus open on the municipal platform opendata.marseille.fr, which allows each citizen, association or company to request the publication of data.

Each month, a "Communication and data opening commission", created in the wake of the municipal council of February 8, must meet to study the requests addressed to it.

A first wave of data has thus been "released".

For example, residents now have access to canteen menus, to cultural routes to take in the area or to a map of streetlights in town.

So much data that should not be taken lightly: "It's black gold, it's an enormous resource that should not be left in the hands of experts," recalls Élise Méouchy of the Donut InfoLab association, which mediates data and contributed, with the newspaper

La Marseillaise

, to the launch of the hashtag #BalanceTonTaudis to collect citizen data on undignified housing.

"It's not enough to press a button"

In Marseille, many collectives are waiting for data on the school canteen market with Sodexo, asbestos diagnoses in schools, danger orders or even on the annexes of the deliberations of municipal councils.

"It's a project and habits that we want to put in place over a whole term," says Christophe Hugon, elected from the pirate party and municipal councilor in charge of transparency and municipal open data, during a conference of press presenting the city's “open data” strategy.

"It is not enough to press a button, there are real technical and legal constraints", he continues, citing the protection of personal data or trade secrets as the main obstacles.

"There is also a more political, decision-making stage, in which we will prioritize the data in committee", also states the elected representative, who sets a concrete example: should we publish a map of buildings in danger, at the risk of devaluing a neighborhood, with social and economic impacts?

"We would like more transparency"

Data should be published every month, at the rate of the meetings of the commission, whose composition is still rather unclear.

“We have a catching-up objective,” says Christophe Hugon, who also wants to make the city's budget more readable and understandable.

"There is a better, it goes in the right direction, but we would like more transparency", reacts Oliver Rovellotti, president of Donut InfoLab and specialist in the management of biodiversity data.

"We can hear that there may be blockages to publish such or such data, but they would have to explain it", he adds, regretting that there is no citizen in the famous commission.

"The expectations are so high, in view of decades of catastrophic management of the city, it continues to take a long time to open the data", deplores Élise Méouchy, who also raises a large part of the equation: "I am in the process of to assume that internally it's complicated ”.

In a city where ATSEM staff is managed with card indexes on boards, there is undoubtedly a whole digital culture to be acquired in the services.

So that "open data" can become a daily reality.

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  • Communities

  • Data

  • Marseilles

  • Digital

  • Society