Open Data to the Next Level: Why and How to Involve the Private Sector

By March 2013, the open-data movement had cleared its initial hurdle: governments at every level were publishing datasets. data.gov in the US held over 400,000 dataset records, the UK's data.gov.uk had a comparable trove, and the Open Data Institute had launched in London the previous October under Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt. The new question was whether anyone outside the open-data movement itself was actually using any of it.

The answer, in early 2013, was: not as much as the publication numbers suggested. The McKinsey Global Institute's Open Data: Unlocking Innovation and Performance with Liquid Information report wasn't published until October that year, but its core argument was already animating policy conversations — that the value of open data lived in private-sector reuse, not in publication. The intermediaries the report eventually identified — companies like OpenCorporates (UK, founded 2010), Mapbox (founded 2010 atop OpenStreetMap), and the early data-broker layer around weather and geospatial data — were exceptions, not a general pattern.

The piece reflected a broader shift in the open-data conversation during 2013: from celebrating publication wins to interrogating reuse infrastructure. Data portals alone weren't a market. Without machine-readable formats, schema documentation, stable URIs, and redistribution-friendly licensing, the supply side ran ahead of the demand side and the political case for continued investment weakened.