OD4Growth project promotion and presentation meeting

On July 25, 2023, we organized an awareness-raising event, with the aim of attracting  representatives from local authorities, data providers and facilitators, to involve them in the future learning plan. We decided to do it ahead of our first stakeholder meeting to consolidate points of view on OD issues, so that everyone can share the solutions already tested and gradually build a community of interest.

Due to the nature of the information exchanged and the stage of the change dynamic in question (awareness-raising), this meeting held on physically and virtually (online) to enable the participation of a maximum of stakeholders in Strasbourg City. Grand Est region is huge (57,441 km2) and we had difficulties to attract someone distant from 200 / 300 km or more at this stage.

Participants (18):

• The meeting was moderated by Grand E-Nov team: Olivier Horent, Stéphanie Toussaint, Benjamin Lallemand and Jean Jacques Bernardini.
• Stakeholders already engaged in the project.
• New potential stakeholders interested by the project.

For most of them, it was the first time they met. The breakfast provided an opportunity for networking and discussion.

Course of the session:
The stakeholders introduced themselves and their institutions. They used the opportunity to explain the importance of open data for their business and services and to depict the principal issues they are facing.

We used this overview of Open Data issues (20 minutes), to identify territories with existing use cases / theorical good practices based on open data.

This enabled us to present OD4Growth project, its ambitions, and its methodology (EU Good practices templates, need for a brief description and highlights of each use case, survey, thematic crossing groups, etc.).

After this introduction to the OD4Growth program, participants were invited to continue their discussions at the stakeholder meeting. which was scheduled to run from 8.30 to 11a.m. but was extended to enable “link building”. This enabled the participants to discover how the learning action plan would be constructed, and thus to appreciate the importance of describing their situation early on in the program.

We discussed the actions to be taken and those already underway, in particular the drafting of a survey.

There were a number of questions and debates about the targets and questions. The participants agreed to:

• Review and refine the questionnaire designed for auditing stakeholders involved in open data initiatives.
• Suggest additional territories and use cases
• Discuss key evaluation criteria for selecting the most promising use cases from the presented territories.

We also discussed about:

• Thematic groups to identity interested stakeholders (Data Grand Est will be part of it).
• Defining the frequency and format of meetings to review progress on the selected use cases.
• Determining the preferred communication channels and establish a communication plan to engage a dynamic.
   

Outcomes:

• The participants seemed satisfied with this first meeting and were keen to take part in the project. The stakeholders engaged is not already fixed. We are working on it to have a good core group really interested.
• Several people from the same organisation will be involved depending on the tasks and actions to be carried out.