Open data in Luxembourg, strategy and best practices (2012) chapter 2

Analysis framework

The goals outlined by the stakeholders are often divided in two categories: political motivations and economic motivations. Depending on the position of the actor in the supply chain or reuse of the data, the expectations vary within these two objectives, with nuances associated with their underlying objectives.

Political motivations

Political perspective intends to develop participation, transparency, rebuilding relationships between citizens and the political and administrative bodies. The desire to involve intermediary bodies is also expressed: by providing data, they could both be more involved and contribute in more reasoned ways. Barack Obama in his Memorandum stresses three concepts .

• Transparency and democratic control. "Harnessing new technologies to get online and make available to the public information about their activities and decisions"
• Participation: "Give citizens more opportunities to contribute to policy development and to provide their Government the benefits of their collective knowledge and expertise";
• Collaboration "Using innovative tools [...] to cooperate at all levels of government, but also with NGOs, companies and individuals from the private sector."

Among the policy objectives should also be included concepts from American political culture, such as self-empowerment, which insist on the empowerment of individuals. The underlying objectives also focus on the improvement of governmental and administrative practices, providing both assessment tools policies, and improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the government.

Economic motivations

Economic objectives understand the open data as a means of fostering innovation, or more generally to contribute to economic growth, improving products and services, or creating new ones, which are also likely to improve the well-being of the population. The aim is also to save time: open data allows the creation of services which created by communities or on their own initiative, would require lengthy and costly process, especially for tenders. This distinction is commonly accepted but does not preclude the existence of many similarities between political and economic objectives.

Objectives typologies

There are not enough studies to affect each objective to each actor, but proposals for conceptual frameworks exist. In 2010 Nat Torkington proposed a typology of five cases:

• low-polling governments who want to see a PR win from opening their data
• transparency advocates who want a more efficient and honest government
• citizen advocates who want services and information to make their lives better
• open advocates who believe that governments act for the people therefore government data should be available for free to the people
• wonks who are hoping that releasing datasets of public toilets will deliver the same economic benefits to the country as did opening the TIGER geo/census dataset.

Davies disagrees and prefers to focus on six types of objectives :

• Government focus: wanting to better understand government and to promote efficiency and accountability;
• Technology innovation focused: interested in creating new platforms and tools, and in semantic-web/linked-data technology;
• Reward focused: seeking recognition and/or profit;
• Digitizing government: Seeking technologically driven improvements in efficiency and functioning of government;
• Problem solving: using OGD to meet specific challenges;
• Social/public sector enterprise: using OGD to provide services in/to the public sector;

Here we propose a rather pragmatic typology rather, based on the place in the cycle of production/reuse of data, following mainly the Pour une politique ambitieuse des données publiques report . Therefore I distinguish three main categories of actors : producers, reusers (intermediate users) and end users. Depending on circumstances, it may be data owners to convince, or reusers and end users to mobilize around open data in Luxembourg.

Typology of stakeholders

Data providers

The largest producers are the central and local governments, enterprises providing a public service, researchers receiving public financial support, and a number of other private actors. Despite the hierarchy in the State, many institutions have considerable autonomy, which may represent a constraint for a State wishing to open the data on a large scale. We can take for example the case of the UK, with the Trading Funds. Uhlir defines a Trading Fund as follows : "Although a trading fund is an operation of a government department, these organizations enjoy a certain amount of self sufficiency in terms of funding, and they are encouraged to behave in a commercial manner." The Ordnance Survey has thrown its weight to maintain a charging model for geographic data, even if he had finally to bow.

The Socrata study on open government data shows enthusiastic support for open data by officials. To the question "Government data is the property of Taxpayers and shoulds be free to all citizens", 92.6% agree. In the same study, this enthusiasm is confirmed by the fact that very large majorities have an interest in the opening of most types of data, only one out of fifteen themes is below the threshold of 50%.

The companies concerned are not only public companies but also private companies engaged in public service. A key challenge is to decide on the ownership of data for this public service, particularly in the area of mobility. Even when the operators are considered proprietary, it is discussed imposing an obligation to open them, see for example the debates in the United-Kingdom on this subject.

In the research field, in connection with the issue of open science, some consider that research done from public funding should see their data publicly available. However, the obligations of this type in the United States do not prevent a very limited compliance rate.

Reusers

Here we adopt a distinction that is not recognized by all authors, some including a group called "end users" in the category of reusers. It is based again on the place in the chain of data use: in general, re-users are considered here as the agents accessing the raw data, provide a treatment phase and a value, and to use a conventional process, turn data into information or knowledge, for end users. But they can be simultaneously end users.

The State itself is one of the most important re-users. The State is, in fact, its biggest customer in the market for data sales. Studies show that up to 70% (quoted by the Pour une politique ambitieuse des données publiques report) of the sales volume for public data transactions are contracted between two different institutions depending of the State. This is a fundamental argument for open data, because even if it is an interaction between two emanations of the State, the accounts are far from zero for the State budget: all pricing system absorbs a portion of the value traded, far from being low in the case of public system.

Economic agents are interested in reuse of public data for their own accout or for the creation of services to end users. Professional organizations have begun to grasp the subject, as the French Group of Information Industry (GFII) which has created a working group on open data.

The Bluenove study, even if it asks questions because of its lack of methodological guidance and relative imprecision questions, shows a strong corporate interest in public data: for example 76% say they are interested in the geographical data.

Some agents, such as startups, are very sensitive to the economic model adopted, any model other than the marginal cost can represent an insurmountable entry cost. Somehow, open data can facilitate the stability of their business model and thus contribute deemed to be more innovative. Indirectly, the decision to open or not influence the economic landscape of the country.

If I do not find any real involvement of citizens in Luxembourg as it may exist elsewhere in the world, I could identify an interest from economic entities. Geosense campaigned for opening transport data in Luxembourg. An employee of Intrasoft , a Luxembourg company, will participate the conference “Open data par où commencer”.

Scientists can also find an interest in the reuse of public data. If there are no studies with quantitative requirements in terms of open data, we can establish a link with the implementation of open access to scientific data. And a study for the European Commission with scientific, scientific and cultural institutions (1140 replies) indicates that a vast majority of respondents support the free dissemination of scientific information, and especially if institutions participated in public financing. "Do you think that results and publications from public Funded research should, as a matter of principle, be available free of charge to readers on the Internet": 90% agree. 87% of respondents agree that there are problems of access to research data , the most important cause being the development and maintenance of infrastructure, followed by lack of incentive for researchers. "Do you think That research data and Publicly Available that results from Public funding should, as a matter of principle, be available for reuse and load it free on the Internet? "90% agree. "Do you think That research data and Publicly Available that results from PARTLY PUBLIC AND PARTLY PRIVATE Funding should, as a matter of principle, be available for reuse and load it free on the Internet? "72% agree but the percentages vary considerably groups. Thus, publishers see open data as a threat. One can see, at least in France, an echo in the long reluctance important transportation agencies to participate in the opening of the data, while unlike publishers, this is not a major pillar of their business.

Civil society actors are the group whose relationship with the open data is easier to determine, associations trying to give the maximum area to their claims. We can distinguish two types: those whose main objective is to support the development of open data movement: the Open Knowledge Foundation - including the Working Group Open Government Data - and Open Data Foundation - and those for which the open data is only part of their activity, e.g. iFRAP in France and the Sunlight Foundation in the United States.

Application developers have a special status: mobile applications, whether they represent only a small part of the possibilities of open data, focus for the moment most of the attention. The survey published by Socrata indicates that 43% of developers want to build applications for the common good, and only 2.6% said they were interested in profit.

Their citizens can access the raw data, but it requires a number of skills, not only to understand the format, data structure, but also contextual knowledge to properly interpret the data. To disseminate knowledge, Open knowledge foundation has launched a School of data. Nevertheless, the majority of users accessing data indirectly open public by means of intermediation.

End users

Among end users, Chignard (2012) proposes to distinguish two types: those who see the raw data or those who access data through mediations and visualizations made by third parties. A question rarely asked is, to what extent end users are willing to use open data or to get involved in the open data movement. One of the few elements of response is provided by Socrata study (2011), that 67% of U.S. citizens agree with the following idea: "Government data is the property of Taxpayers and should be free to all citizens". The aim is to promote transparency can also be achieved through the involvement of citizens in the process of data production.

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