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description: This section covers organisation-level decisions about data publishing.
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# Why Are You Opening Data?

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.      &#x20;

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 challenge&#x73;_<mark style="color:green;">.</mark>_&#x20;



### Key motivations for opening data are:&#x20;

**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 Canva](https://theodi.org/insights/guides/data-and-public-services-business-case-canvas/)s

**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

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<summary>Why are you not opening data?</summary>

Legal reasons aside, there are occasionally good reasons for not opening data.&#x20;

&#x20;Opening data may conflict with duty of care to objects or locations (in particular relevant to heritage organisations).&#x20;

Your data opening motivations are not aligned with your organisational strategy.

It's too early - before you open data you need to engage in further discovery activity about the context you are working in.&#x20;

A competing products analysis may reveal the data you wish to open is already available from other sources, which you could adopt for your users' needs.&#x20;

Finally, data that might be termed 'extractive' - ie, collected from a particular group of citizens and then opened to benefit an entirely seperate ecosystem, may be better served being kept for the benefit of the original data generators.&#x20;

**Read:** [Te Hiku Media's Maori language dataset](https://www.wired.com/story/maori-language-tech/)





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**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](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gr_k2BdGrIhE-g7mBS9pr2S27nqMrYcqltMBZacaA20/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.hk5davl783q6) 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. &#x20;







