The main dish of administrative management: a ration of open data

Open data, as generators of knowledge, arouse more and more interest of administration, reuse companies and citizens in general. However, there are still doubts about how to publish, manage and use this type of information.

The article The main dish of the administrative management: a ration of open data, written by Roberto Magro Pedroviejo, Head of Interactive Services, Responsible for the Municipal Web, Transparency and Open Data of the City of Alcobendas, and recently published by El consultor de los Ayuntamientos, try to shed some light on the current situation of open data and future trends.

The article consists of a series of reflections, based on experience and knowledge acquired, on different aspects of the universe of open data. The main conclusions are summarized below:

• Open data as raw material. Open data is the necessary raw material to generate knowledge; knowledge that will make public administration more efficient, as well as could be used todevelop better public policies and services. According to the article, open data must "have a structure, an open format, comply with standards and be understandable and interoperable to generate value." In addition, they must be "susceptible to be processed through information automation processes".
• The value of new technologies. Big Data, 5G or blockchain are some of the technologies that will optimize the management and analysis of the large amounts of data produced. The article also highlights that public administrations should provide free and easy-to-use tools to citizens so that they can experiment and create visualizations that facilitate the understanding of information.
• Benefits for both public and private sectors. Data publication is not an end in itself, but a means to be more transparent and accountable, as well as to generate social and economic value through its reuse. The European Union estimates that, in 2030, "the value of data for the economy will reach 194,000 million euros and more than 700,000 jobs will be based on the management of public sector data".
• The importance of relying on guides. As for example, the "FEMP 2019 Open Data Guide. 40 sets of data to be published by the Local Entities", published at the end of 2018. This guide suggest the publication of a minimum of common data in all local entities to facilitate its reuse. Along the same lines, the new European directive on the reuse of public sector information suggest that EU member states focus on several thematic areas, such as geospatial data, environmental data or statistical data.
• The need to incorporate new profiles. The article emphasizes that it is necessary to create multidisciplinary teams, incorporating new profiles such as data scientists, data engineers, sociologists and anthropologists, data analysts, experts in semantics and linguistics or even philosophers.
• Creation of data offices. These are organizations that collect, analyze and interpret data from different sources: smart cities, sensors, official statistics, etc. The fact of having all the information unified will facilitate decision making.
• There are still challenges to be overcome. For example, knowing who is reusing the data, what their objective are and what results are, in order to measure their performance and impact; or encourage collaboration between people, public administrations, companies, etc. to detect and look for social problems solutions. It also highlights the need for open data to be linked semantically by default, as well as normalizing vocabularies and formats.

The article also includes a series of recommendations, such as that "Public administartions should be, by default, open organizations and should assume a key concept: the single data" or "open data should not only be used to be delivered to society, they should also be useful for internal consumption within the organization."

You can read the full article here.