Open Data Challenges

I have been visiting the World Bank the past days to discuss various open data projects, e.g. in Kenya, Moldova and Tunisia.
During one of the meetings, an informal one during lunch, we discussed the challenges we see for open data in the coming time.

These are the challenges I mentioned as seeing become (more) relevant at the moment, looking forward.

1. Turning open data into a policy instrument for government bodies, so that government needs open data for their own policy efforts. This is putting open data forward to:
   • cut budgets
   • measure impact
   • stimulate participaton
   • have others through app building contribute to policy aims
   • re-use data of other PSB's
2. Increasing the skills and 'literacy' of citizens and re-users around open data. The original open data activists have the data they wanted, so we need to grow the group of people who wants data. That means also increasing the number of people who can (or see how they can) work with data.
3. Getting government bodies to work together across borders the way citizens already do. Coders are networked across the EU, and work together. Public sector bodies are bound to jurisdictions, and connections are routed through higher hierarchical levels, not at operational level, where practical matters are at hand, and where open data could be brought forward.
4. Stimulating corporations to open data, in contrast or complementary to published government data. Stimulating citizen generated or citizen shared data.
5. Measuring policy impact in two ways: by making impact visible in connected data sets, that exist before, during and after policy implementation for non-open data policies, and by collecting stories plus their metadata around open data related policies to measure the non-economical impact of open data.
6. Making sure that the notion of what 'real' open data is remains intact when the technology becomes less visible as it disappears under the hood of the applications that use open data and where users of those applications may not realize it is based on open government data. (much in the same way it is necessary to keep the importance of an open and free, dumb at the core, smart at the edges, internet in the awareness of people, because that is what drives the affordances we value in much of the things we do over the internet)

Tags: challenges, opendata, World Bank