Definition of a Public Organisation

I guess that depends on the question: What hangs on the precision of the definition? An overly broad definition can be misleading for users and stakeholders and can lead to scope creep by authors. An overly narrow definition can fail to include stakeholders, to attract users or to cover important use cases.

I think the present definition strikes a good balance between the two. If we are to make it more (or less) precise, those changes should be motivated by a desire to address one of the above issues (or some other I haven't mentioned). If it's just to make it more precise for the sake of it, that won't be productive.

Thanks James. The wording came from Thomas D'Haenens. If there are no objections, I'll consider this issue as 'needs review.'

I suggest that we look also into existing definitions of public organisation (or synomyms), e.g. by standardisation initiatives or found in legislation. 

For example, IATE defines public body as follows: "any body, corporate or otherwise, that performs its duties and exercises its powers for the public benefit, as opposed to private gain" [1]

Let's open the discussion to the mailing list and ask the WG members to contribute definitions of public organisation from their countries. 

[1] http://iate.europa.eu/FindTermsByLilId.do?lilId=3563447&langId=en

Additionally, from a data modelling point of view, I believe that Public Organization should be defined as a subclass of org:FormalOrganization. What does the WG think?

Nikos: The IATE definition would mean that charities (in Canada at least) are public bodies. The current definition excludes charities.

Point taken James. The point of my remark is more to encourage the use of existing definitions for 'Public organisation' rather than coming up with our own. 

Hi Nikos,

To be clear, I too am a believer of re-use of definitions.  It's just that I haven't encountered one defining the public sector in terms of formal or legal frameworks and let this happen to be the cornerstone of what we believe to be a generic approach to defining public sector...

Off course I don't know everything there is to know, so please enlighten me of you should come across something in that direction :-).

I would like to see parliaments, city councils etc. considered as being in scope. And in those contexts I would also like to see political parties and political groups covered by the definition.

Hi,

Interestingly there is no term “public organization” in Eurovoc. Term “public sector” (http://eurovoc.europa.eu/830) falls under the business classification micro-thesauri, i.e. public ownership is the key viewpoint here.

There is also a term “public institution” (http://eurovoc.europa.eu/878) that is a narrower term to the “public administration” that falls under the executive power and public service micro-thesauri. My understanding of the term “public institution” is that it is an institution of the executive power whose primary objective is to deliver some public service.

I do not think that these terms are mutually exclusive, but seeing the initial definition of a public organization the term “public sector” probably needs to be defined as well. Is this term within the CPOV understood as in Eurovoc?

Definition of “public institution” in Eurovoc leads to the separation of powers – executive, legislative, judicial. Does “public organization” in CPOV represents only an organization of the executive power? This influences whether parliaments as mentioned by Andreas and also courts are within the scope of the CPOV.

Another definition that could be taken into consideration is the definition of a “public sector body” in the directive PSI Directive (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32003L009…). Public sector body is defined as “the State, regional or local authorities, bodies governed by public law and associations formed by one or several such authorities or one or several such bodies governed by public law”. Body governed by public law is defined by the PSI Directive as any body “(a) established for the specific purpose of meeting needs in the general interest, not having an industrial or commercial character; and (b) having legal personality; and (c) financed, for the most part by the State, or regional or local authorities, or other bodies governed by public law; or subject to management supervision by those bodies; or having an administrative, managerial or supervisory board, more than half of whose members are appointed by the State, regional or local authorities or by other bodies governed by public law”.

This definition reflects the legal status mentioned in the initial definition of a public organization but it also reflects the public interest mentioned in the IATE definition. The financing part of the definition might help to decide whether a charity is a public organization.

To make matters a little bit more complicated: According to the legal main stream view in Germany city councils and similar municipal councils seem to belong to the executive power and not the legislative power.

Hi,

in Eurovoc (http://eurovoc.europa.eu/drupal/?q=el/request&view=pt&termuri=http://eu…) the Greek equivalent for "Public Insitution" is "Δημόσιος Οργανισμός" (the exact translation of which is "Public Organisation") and it is defined as "Legal person governed by public law, other than Local Authorities, that ensures the management of a public service or activity that falls under the responsibility of the authorities". To be honest, I don't like this definition very much but I think it poses some interesting issues: (1) should Local Authorities be excluded? (2) is the provision of a public service enough to define a public organisation? (3) What about organisations that belong to the state but are of a different legal form? In Greece for example we have Legal Persons governed by Private Law, Public Enterprises concerned with the provision to the public of essentials, etc which belong to the state but have different organisational and administrative structure than a "typical" organisation and often fall under another legal framework. Instinctively (or even from an operational point of view) I would include them to Public Organisations, but at a second look (and from a legal point of view) they could be excluded.

In GEMET "Public Institution" (http://www.eionet.europa.eu/gemet/concept?cp=12912&langcode=en&ns=1) is defined as "Institution for the management of public issues", which also implies public services (or not?).

Should we see the definition in relation with the Use Cases described, in order to decide about how narrow (or broad) it should be?

@Loukia My views:

(1) should Local Authorities be excluded?

No, they should be included. A very large number of Public Organisations are Local Authorities.

(3) What about organisations that belong to the state but are of a different legal form?

They should be in scope. It should be possible to indicate the legal form using CPOV.

I think that common sense and operational points of view are more important than legal points of view for this specification.

I agree that both local authorities and organisations that belong to the state but are of a different legal form should be in the scope of CPOV. The proposed definition of public organisation does not exclude these types of organisations given that some legal framework binds them to the public sector. This is, in my opinion, the trickiest part of the proposed definition. For example in the Czech Republic the legal framework is usually not explicit about this and therefore some inference is needed.

I think the term 'legal framework' should be widely interpreted (maybe more toward 'formal framework'), but then again not so wide that anyone can come up with some 'formal' framework. There should be a structural, democratic-based agreement denoting the organisation as public sector.

I completely agree that we shouldn't let ourselves be held back to 'legal organisations' (for that's only one possible framework to denote organisations).

The meeting of 2016-03-09 resolved to retain the short definition of a Public Organisation but to augment it by quoting the PSI Directive as suggested by Jan Kučera.