Accessibility Settings

color options

monochrome muted color dark

reading tools

isolation ruler

Stories

Topics

Democracy Is the Business Case for Open Data

opendata-uI’ve been working in the Open Data community for about a year and a lot of people ask me, “What’s the business case for Open Data?” Most of the software driving the Open Data movement is Open Source and free or nearly free. Data governance is handled on the fly. Lots of data is published at low refresh rates, with poor data quality, and no standard metadata. It is published in catalogs and it is extremely boring to read a catalog full of data. The people who work with open data are hackers in hackathons using open source tools and open source cloud with open data.

“Where’s the friggin ROI [return on investment]…?” my friends all ask me.

The friggin ROI is in preventing more of this from happening around the world:

The confluence of widely available information technology, social networking, and a vicious global recession have increased global awareness of income inequality and the growing indulgence of the governing classes. People are increasingly frustrated with elected leaders who look after themselves first, corporations second, and the people last. This frustration is leading to alarming rates of international and domestic terrorism, and the rise of far right, fascist, parties at the polls.

Democracy as a widespread form of government is a scant two centuries old. Monarchy and Dictatorship are far more popular historically. Even today, there are only 88 countries out of 195 that are democratic and free, and this number can quickly erode if free societies do not embrace Open Government and Open Data and let sunlight shine into many dark and dingy corners of governance that have been hidden from public view for decades.

The business case for Open Data? It is the survival of Democracy itself and everyone should take this challenge very seriously. We can’t afford to take Democracy for granted. And if that alone isn’t motivating enough for my private sector colleagues, just remember what Fascism in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal looked like in the 20th Century. It wasn’t good for people and wasn’t good for business.

Democracy is the business case for Open Data and everyone should be fighting for Open Government because the alternatives are frighteningly real and present dangers.


AdlerSteven Adler (@DataGov) is chief information strategist for IBM. He is an expert in data science and an innovator who has developed several billion-dollar-revenue businesses in the areas of data governance, enterprise privacy architectures, and Internet insurance. He has advised governments and large NGOs on open government, data standards, privacy, and systemic risk. 

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.

Republish this article


Material from GIJN’s website is generally available for republication under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. Images usually are published under a different license, so we advise you to use alternatives or contact us regarding permission. Here are our full terms for republication. You must credit the author, link to the original story, and name GIJN as the first publisher. For any queries or to send us a courtesy republication note, write to hello@gijn.org.

Read Next

Data Journalism Reporting Tools & Tips

OjoPúblico Launches Data Journalism Guide

With the aim of contributing to the promotion of data-based investigations and asserting its vision of journalism as an essential service to democracy, OjoPúblico has published “La navaja suiza del reportero. Herramientas de investigación en la era de los datos masivos” (“The Swiss Army Knife Journalist: Digital Research Tools in the Era of Big Data”), a resource for Hispanic reporters who want to become familiar with the world of data journalism and, above all, to understand its meaning and relevance in Latin America and the world.

Data Journalism

Putting the “Open” in Open Data: Creating a Global Standard

Open Data is spreading across the globe and transforming the way data is collected, published, and used. But all of this is happening without well-documented standards, leading to inconsistent metadata, no or little corroboration of sources, and conflicting terms of use. The Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group is working to change this.

Data Journalism

We Need MUCH More Data

Telling us that traffic accidents happen on streets over time is nice, but it’s just the beginning of an Open Data Odyssey that governments, civil society, and other organizations must begin together to document and describe the tertiary impacts of these events, and many other events, on our collective experiences and lives in large urban ecosystems like New York.

Data Journalism

Global Open Data Index: Only 11% of Key Datasets Are Open

Open Knowledge, the UK-based nonprofit that focuses on unlocking data around the world, has released the latest version of its Global Open Data Index. The index attempts to make sense of the explosion in open government data portals, which have grown from just a handful three years ago to nearly 400 worldwide. The good news: the number of entries and data sets is growing. The bad: only 11% of the datasets surveyed are deemed open by the index.