Why Are You Opening Data?
This section covers organisation-level decisions about data publishing.
To take a user-centric approach to open data publication, it’s key to know who your users will be. This will in a large part be driven by your motivation for publishing open data. This should be driven by organisational strategy, as a thematically separate data policy can be expensive and difficult to manage.
Think about your existing strengths - if you aren’t strong in innovation already, opening some data will not miraculously cure it – your open data activities should be aligned with business strengths and challenges.
Key motivations for opening data are:
Regulatory compliance
- Statutory or legal requirement
- Policy initiative
Innovation
- Creation of new products and services
- Open innovation (products and services for the publishing organisation or their customers created by third parties)
Tools: Data and Public Services Business Case Canvas
External incentives
- Transparency
- Reputation
- Freedom of Information request (FOI) alternative
- Funding availability
Internal incentives
- Improving your organisation’s own data
- Setting or leading standards across the industry
- Enhancing other internal initiatives
Social/ideological incentives
- Open science
- Responsible research and innovation
- Campaigning
- Supporting other groups to understand what kind of data they may want to collect
To Do: It can be useful to try to ask the opposite questions to identify the benefits and value of opening your data. Questions might include: Why are you not opening data? What is the impact of not opening data? Who are you excluding? Who is not being benefited?
Tool: The Value of Data Canvas outlines key questions to ask to know your data, know your ecosystem and the value they would find in it, and the incentives and value of the data to your organisation.
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