Drawing on a two-year ethnographic study within several French administrations involved in open data programs, this article aims to investigate the conditions of the release of government data - the rawness of which open data policies require. This article describes two sets of phenomena. First, far from being taken for granted, open data emerge in administrations through a progressive process that entails uncertain collective inquiries and extraction work. Second, the opening process draws on a series of transformations, as data are modified to satisfy an important criterion of open data policies: the need for both human and technical intelligibility. There are organizational consequences of these two points, which can notably lead to the visibilization or the invisibilization of data labour. Finally, the article invites us to reconsider the apparent contradiction between the process of data release and the existence of raw data. Echoing the vocabulary of one of the interviewees, the multiple operations can be seen as a 'rawification' process by which open government data are carefully generated. Such a notion notably helps to build a relational model of what counts as data and what counts as work.
While many governments are now committed to release Open Government Data under non-proprietarystandardized formats, less attention has been given to the actual consequences of these standardsfor knowledge workers. Unpacking the history of three open data standards (CSV, GTFS, IATI), thispaper shows what is actually happening when these standards are enacted in the work practices ofbureaucracies. It is built on participant-observer enquiry and interviews focussed on the back rooms ofopen data, and looking specifi cally at the invisible work necessary to construct open datasets. It showsthat the adoption of open standards is increasingly becoming an indicator of the advancement of opendata programmes. Enacting open standards involves much more than simple technical operations, itoperates a quiet and localised transformation of bureaucracies, in which the decisions of data workershave substantive consequences for how the open government data and transparency agendas areperformed.Keywords: Open Government Data; Open Standards; Enactment; Infrastructure Studies; DataAssemblages
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