The following question was recently posted on Quora:
“What are the advantages of opening Government data?”
Read the responses below from technology experts:
Gianfranco Cecconi, Digital Contraptions Imaginer:
There are many, from transparency to accountability, from engaging citizens to enabling fact-based policy, or empowering the value added services ecosystem that can be built around that data etc.. The G20 just a few days ago stressed the importance of fighting corruption thanks to Open Data, for example, see
this very recent article by Martin Tisné at the Omidyar Network.
Thinking laterally, your question should rather be: why isn’t Government data open in the first place? In democracies, institutions are there to represent us and run the system in our name. By principle, there is no rationale for anything Government or Parliament do not to be in the open, if not for some matters of national security (and that could be argued, too).
These days we need to talk in terms of “opening Government data” just because by default it is not. And Government data is not open by default just because we come from thousands of years of history in which technology could not empower effective and affordable data capture, management and publishing. With time, what was originally a technology constraint became just a privilege, a matter of culture, a shield from accountability. Still today, rarely a new public institution / office / team is created to be open by design.
See it also this way: if you started a brand new democratic state from scratch tomorrow, wouldn’t it be perfectly open? How could you justify anything else and call yourself a democracy?
Begtin Ivan, Founder of OpenGovData.ru:
There are two basic approaches how government could act with government data with economic impact.
One approach is to sell it to the interested business and to use revenues to run government agencies.
The only KPI of this approach money that government receive
Another approach is to provide data for free for everybody and to help IT business to reuse this data and to create new products and services.
It could be viewed as subsidy for any IT business. Subsidy not as money, but as free fuel to launch new businesses.
KPI of this approach is different:
- new businesses launched;
- new workplaces;
- money that government receive as taxes;
- venture money attracted
and so on.
Also we could measure economic impact of greater attention on decision making process of the government, procurement transparency and so on.