Open Governments, Open Data

Abstract

Governments around the world have embraced technology deployments intended to make cities, communities, and governments smarter. Yet the wealth of data that governments and communities gather is often left in databases or is simply released as files in an online portal. The commitment to this simplified portal-based data sharing has led some to question if governments have data management plans to assist in deciding what data should be widely open and publicly available in a highly connected, always available online world where data is easy to collect, but difficult to delete or challenge.To examine approaches to managing government-held data in a structured and detailed way, this chapter will apply the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework in order to analyze open government data (OGD) as a knowledge resource (Frischmann, Madison, and Strandburg 2014). Specific to our case, we argue that a framework that considers data as belonging to digital commons of intellectual and cultural resources is an appropriate and useful tool to consider open government data. As Divya Siddarth and E. Glen Weyl (2021) point out:

A fourth way to the digital transformation: The data republic as a fair data ecosystem

“…So far, however, DC initiatives remain affected by limited replicability (de Lange and de Waal, 2019) and scalability (Calzada and Almirall, 2020). On the other hand, OD and SDIs initiatives have consolidated over the last three decades backed up at both institutional and infrastructural levels (Welle Donker and van Loenen, 2017; Mulder et al, 2020; Raymond and Kouper, 2023). And yet, these initiatives miss the needed context-flexibility to respond to locals’ data needs and involve them in the provision of indigenous data (Lupi et al, 2020; Verhulst et al, 2020; Valli Buttow and Weerts, 2022).…”