Data Ownership and Open Data: The Potential for Data-Driven Policy Making

Abstract

As part of the rhetoric surrounding the Smart City concept, cities are increasingly facing challenges related to data (management, governance, processing, storage, publishing etc.). The growing power acquired by the data market and the great relevance assigned to data ownership rather than to data-exploitation knowhow is affecting the development of a data culture and is slowing down the embedding of data-related expertise inside public administrations. Concurrently, policies call for more open data to foster service innovation and government transparency. What are the consequences of these phenomena when imagining the potential for policy making consequent to the growing data quantity and availability? Which strategic challenges and decisions do public authorities face in this regard? What are valuable approaches to arm public administrations in this “war on data”? The Smart Flanders program was initiated by the Flemish Government (Belgium) in 2017 to research and support cities with defining and implementing a common open data policy. As part of the program, a “maturity check” was performed, evaluating the cities on several quantitative and qualitative parameters. This exercise laid to bare some challenges in the field of open data and led to a checklist that cities can employ to begin tackling them, as well as a set of model clauses to be used in the procurement of new technologies.

Data Cultures: a scoping literature review

“…Papers classified at this level represented the second largest cluster, with some very closely aligned to level 3 papers. These were the studies of data practices and competencies of people working in organizational settings (papers 1, 2, 6, 50, 61, 70, 75), but also papers considering competencies from a broader, societal view (papers 14,45,46,63,74). Another group focused on educational needs (papers 25,33,35,42,62,69).…”

Data driven approaches for smart city planning and design: a case scenario on urban data management

“…In providing services to citizens and other stakeholders in cities, there is need for availability of quality data to meet stakeholders' requirements and achieving municipality's objectives (Walravens et al, 2021). Data governance refers the exercise of authority and control, planning, enforcement and monitoring over the management of data assets.…”

“…In addition, use of legacy systems, constrained and resources data heterogeneity lead to vertically siloed data applications (Bokolo et al, 2021b). Data in these applications are generally "locked" in their domain such as one system resulting to vendor lock-in (Walravens et al, 2021) or one service provider and cannot be reused and shared by other application, system or provider (Brutti et al, 2019). Interoperability is an issue in smart city planning and design because of lack of data standards and inadequate technical ability to access data and fragmented usage and development of software platforms (Sutherland and Cook, 2017).…”

Designing data policy and governance for smart cities: theoretical essay using the IAD framework to analyze data-driven policy

“…Synthetically, smart cities design and offer different urban policies based on data-driven policy. Data-driven policies are policies whose design is based on big data instruments to solve policy problems (Athey, 2017;Walravens, Ballon, Compernolle, & Borghys, 2021).…”