Fully in favour of this and we are making efforts to publish as much of our data publicly as we can. We have set up an open data portal for this purpose.

My country differs from Germany in that our Freedom of Information laws are much broader and allow anyone to request virtually any record held by a public organisation, with the grounds for refusal being narrower. For example, generic day to day email exchanges between low level public officials are requestable and we have to argue why it is against the public interest to prevent releasing them.

While we're trying to publish as much data that is of public interest ad possible, it's proving very difficult to anticipate many of these requests.

In my organisation in particular - we're receiving requests from consultation firms outside the EU on costings for certain services. So we(The taxpayer) are essentially doing their research for them.