The Opening Up Project

The project

Opening Up is an Interreg IVb project on Open Data and Social Media.

Social media are now part of our daily lives. A first assignment for a local government is to use these social media channels in their own communications. A second, much more difficult task for local governments, is to organize their own processes to be able to listen to what citizens, businesses and organizations, using the same social media, are saying about the municipal service delivery. By promoting dialogue and combining technology and interaction these media have become extremely valuable networks for citizens and consumers. Along with a more open style of communication, there is an increasing move toward the opening up of information, primarily through the formal and informal release of large datasets (e.g. by data.gov.uk in the UK, overheid.nl/opendata in the Netherlands and data.gov.be in Belgium).

The challenge for governments and companies is to create custom tools and approaches to work with this information and integrate their services with social networks. Opening Up aims to help them develop innovative services through the use of open data and to encourage smart use of social media. In the project, eight European regions around the North Sea will test new methods, set up training, and develop ad hoc applications.

The Opening Up objectives include:

• Develop transformational citizen-led services through the use of social media approaches.
• Integrate social media into government and business service delivery
• Spearhead the adoption and use of open data by governments and businesses
• Set up an accredited training programme on social media
• Extend the European Service List to include new social media channels
• Build a community of practitioners in the NSR aimed at promoting the adoption and use of social media in government-citizen, government-business and government-government relations
•  Build instruments to measure an organisations capacity to use social media to develop relationships with their stakeholders