Open Data

Open Data was the section of Government In The Lab where most of the magazine's analytical weight sat between 2010 and 2013. The era opened with the publication-and-portals phase: data.gov had launched in May 2009 with around 47 datasets, data.gov.uk launched in January 2010 with several thousand, and over the next 36 months portal counts globally moved from dozens of jurisdictions to several hundred. The U.S. federal Open Government Directive (December 2009) required agencies to publish three high-value datasets within 45 days; the EU's PSI Directive revisions and the OECD's data-portal recommendations created parallel pressures elsewhere.

By mid-2012 the conversation had shifted. The Open Data Institute had launched in London under Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt; Tim Davies's Five Stars of Open Data Engagement framework gave the field a way to talk about reuse rather than just publication; and the McKinsey Global Institute's October 2013 Open Data report — which estimated trillions in annual global economic value across multiple sectors — made the political case for continued funding. The harder question — whether anyone outside the open-data movement was actually reusing the published data, and whether the licensing, schema, and stewardship infrastructure existed to support reuse — became the magazine's recurring beat.

What the section preserved across roughly four years of coverage was the shift from celebrating publication wins to interrogating reuse infrastructure. Licensing fragmentation in France, the contractor share of the U.S. classified-data population, the 5-star engagement framework, the ROI-of-open-data argument, the OpenStreetMap humanitarian-response work after the Christchurch and Tōhoku earthquakes, and the regional comparisons across Spain, Quebec, New Zealand, and the Asia-Pacific portals all sat in this section.