Open Data Values: Calculating and Monitoring the Benefits of Public Sector Information Re-Use
Published in T. Dreier et al. (eds.), Informationen der öffentlichen Hand – Zugang und Nutzung, Nomos: Baden 2016, pp. 107-144.
39 Pages Posted: 14 Jul 2016
There are 2 versions of this paper
Open Data Values: Calculating and Monitoring the Benefits of Public Sector Information Re-Use
Open Data Values: Calculating and Monitoring the Benefits of Public Sector Information Re-Use
Date Written: March 9, 2016
Abstract
As the rapid growth of the Open Government Partnership shows, it is by now conventional wisdom that opening up government information for broader use by industry, civil society and citizens produces many benefits: better performing government, more citizen participation and impressive economic benefits. This paper analyses what the economic studies tell us about the estimated value of public sector information. It shows how challenging it is to get a clear sense of that value. The development of methods to actually measure the wider impacts of opening up government information is a work in progress. A recent addition are instruments to rank public sector effort in opening up. What do these new strands of monitoring add to the economic figures? How do economic benefits relate to the many professed advantages – be it social, political or economic – of openness? As we start to unpack this, we can also look forward to the long-term implications for the regulatory framework in the EU. Special focus will be on the Directive on re-use of public sector information a.k.a. the Public Sector Information Directive (Directive 2003/98/EC as amended by Directive 2013/37/EU).
Keywords: public sector information; open data; economic value; EU; transparency; freedom of information; accountability; open government
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