City Data Exchange

The City Data Exchange was a private/public collaboration between the Municipality of Copenhagen, The Capital Region of Denmark, and Hitachi to examine the possibilities of private/public data exchange.

The project examined purchasing, selling, and sharing a broad range of data types between all kinds of users in a city – citizens, public institutions, and private companies.

In 2013, the City of Copenhagen, and the Copenhagen Region decided to invest in the creation of a marketplace for the exchange of public, and private sector data. This was an innovative approach to test the readiness of the market to deliver new data-sharing solutions. The CDE was the result of a tender by the Municipality of Copenhagen and the Capital Region of Denmark in 2015. Hitachi Consulting won the tender and invested, and worked with the Municipality of Copenhagen, and the Capital Region of Denmark to establish an organization and a technical platform.

Since May 2015, and especially after the launch at the Town Hall in May 2016, the CDE team has gathered a lot of knowledge. Establishing and operating the CDE has been a co-creation process and the CDE team has been in contact with a large group of citizens, companies, and organizations to understand the market mechanisms and build up a wider data ecosystem around the CDE.

Insights from the City Data Exchange project

The City Data Exchange was a pilot project and ended in 2018, but a lot of insights and knowledge have been gathered from the project

The City and the Region of Copenhagen are utilizing the insights from the CDE project to improve their internal activities and to shape new policies. The lessons from the CDE also provide insights into a wider national infrastructure for effective data sharing. Based on the insights from approximately 1000 people that the CDE has been in contact with, the recommendations are:

  • Start with the use case, as it is key to engage the data community that will use the data
  • Create a data competence hub, where the data community can meet and get support
  • Create simple standards and guidelines for data publishing.

Contact us, If you want to read the paper 'City Data Exchange - Lessons learned from a private/public data collaboration'. The paper documents an extract of the experiences from the project. It covers the following areas:

  • The Demand For Data
  • Barriers to Effective Data Exchange
  • Future Trends For Data Exchanges
  • Creating An Effective Data Infrastructure
  • Project Activities And Results
  • Reflections of The CDE in the City and Region.