Europe looks at the importance of measuring data demand in the public sector

What are the needs of European public institutions that reuse open data? This is the question posed by the European Commission, through the European open data initiative data.europa.eu, and which is the starting point of the report "Measuring data demand within the public sector", recently published by the initiative.

The report is part of a series of actions that data.europa.eu is undertaking to encourage the re-use of data by the public sector. It is a year-long campaign that will include a series of articles and a webinar. The campaign will culminate in a second report on the findings.

This first report lays the groundwork for the issues to be addressed, setting out 3 objectives:

• Clarify the importance of public institutions as data re-users.
• Identify methods and good practices for assessing the demand from public institutions.
• Stimulate debate on the most appropriate way to foster the re-use of open data by public institutions.

Ultimately, the aim is to foster a data-driven public sector that recognises data as an integral asset for policy formulation, service delivery, management and public innovation.

The benefits of open data re-use by public institutions

Traditionally, in the open data ecosystem, an approach has been followed where the roles were divided: the public sector was the provider of data and the private sector was the re-user. However, this is changing and more and more institutions are realising the benefits of harnessing the potential of open data.

The report highlights how the OECD has identified three areas where data re-use can improve the effectiveness of public institutions:

1. Anticipating governance. Open data helps to predict trends and patterns in order to mitigate emerging risks and respond to developing crises. One example is the interactive dashboard developed by Eurostat with statistical, monthly and quarterly indicators. This dashboard is used by different countries to monitor the economic and social recovery linked to the COVID-19 pandemic.

2. Policy and service design and delivery. Open data helps to understand issues, engage citizens and drive evidence-based policy making. The report gives the example of the Baltic Sea regions, where cross-border use of open government data is being applied to improve social services.

3. Performance management. Open data can also have an impact on increased public sector productivity, more efficient use of resources and better policy evaluation. In this respect, the European Commission's agri-food data portal, which integrates data from multiple European institutions, facilitates the calculation of key indicators for the evaluation of agricultural policies in all countries.

Open data therefore helps to make public services and policies more efficient, but also more sustainable, inclusive and trustworthy, benefiting citizens and businesses. However, despite these advantages, we find that much data in public institutions still does not flow freely, but is siloed. There is a lack of incentive to share, but also a fear of loss of control, among other factors.

The report suggests that the solution lies in taking into account and measuring the demand for data from public institutions. Knowing the benefits of opening up certain data encourages other institutions to open up and reuse it. In this regard, the report highlights, among others, Spain's efforts in engaging with user communities and monitoring the re-use of public data through the Aporta Initiative.

Existing approaches to assessing public institutions' demand for data

After this first part focusing on the benefits, the report goes on to analyse the approaches and indicators that currently exist in the European landscape for assessing the needs of public institutions as data re-users, in order to determine which methods are the most appropriate.

The literature review and the analysis of international measurement frameworks show that demand measurement is not common. The approaches and indicators developed by EU institutions and Member States are few and far between, and focus on fostering demand for data that is already available, without determining the extent of actual re-use of publicly available data and the impact achieved with it. Moreover, they usually focus on re-users in general and on groups such as businesses, journalists, civil society, etc., while neglecting the public sector.

Among the most advanced countries in this area, the report mentions Spain, where a proactive strategy is adopted through challenges and hackathons, co-creation events, information sessions and regular training.

When it comes to measuring impact, a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods is recommended, for example:

• Analyse IP addresses and web statistics.
• Implement web crawling techniques (e.g. search APIs) to identify mentions of open data reuse.
• Quantitative analysis of Tweets mentioning open data.
• Conduct online questionnaires and interviews with re-users.
• Use of contact forms so that users can share use cases or rating systems so that they can rate datasets.

In Spain, quite a few initiatives have already implemented these mechanisms, along with additional ones.

The report also reviews some international indices and reports in search of indicators that measure demand. Many, such as the Global Open Data Index, the Open Data Barometer or the Open Data Inventory (ODIN) focus on data provision and do not include any indicators to calculate the demand for open data by or within public institutions. However, here too the situation is changing and we find other reports such as the European Open Data Maturity Assessment or the Open Data Readiness Assessment (ODRA) that do include this type of metric. Also the forthcoming Global Data Barometer, produced by the Latin American open data initiative ILDA and the Data for Development Network, will include demand indicators as part of the study.

In this sense, the report includes in the annex two tables, one with the overview of the frameworks examined and another one that groups the indicators included in these frameworks that can be used to analyse the demand for open data from public institutions.

Next steps

The paper concludes with a list of key questions emerging from the research, which will be used to trigger a debate among stakeholders on appropriate methods and indicators to measure the demand for data from public institutions, in the context of the data.europa.eu portal. Examples of such questions are: what are the appropriate activities to attract re-users in the public sector or how can automated metrics be leveraged to measure the demand for data from public institutions.

A webinar will take place on Tuesday 29 March to discuss this report. Speakers from different agencies will explain how they engage with data re-users in public institutions, measure their demand and incorporate data into their open data policies. You can register at this link.