El Open Government llega a los programas electorales

By September 2011, Spain was in the run-up to the November 20, 2011 general election that would replace the Zapatero PSOE government with the Rajoy Partido Popular government. Open-government and open-data commitments had appeared, for the first time in Spanish electoral history, across the manifestos of all the major parties — PSOE, PP, UPyD, and IU — though with markedly different framings. PSOE's commitments built on the Zapatero government's earlier work on the Esquema Nacional de Interoperabilidad and the Plan Avanza digital-services programme; PP's commitments emphasised efficiency and anti-corruption framings.

The Spanish open-data community in 2011 was unusually active for a country that didn't yet have national open-data legislation. Aporta — the cross-government open-data initiative coordinated through Red.es — had been operating since 2009; the regional governments of the País Vasco, Cataluña, and Asturias had launched portals in advance of the national one; and the Asociación Pro Bono Publico and adjacent open-data initiatives were running hackathons in Madrid and Barcelona. The campaign commitments reflected a community that had spent two years preparing the ground for whichever government took office.

The Rajoy government's 2013 Ley de Transparencia, Acceso a la Información Pública y Buen Gobierno (Spain's first comprehensive transparency law) and the 2015 launch of the consolidated datos.gob.es portal both flowed from the framework that the 2011 electoral commitments had set up. The piece captured an unusual moment — when an emerging policy area appeared in the platforms of all four major parties at the same time.