[okfn-discuss] what are the arguments against open data

Tue Oct 8 11:08:57 UTC 2013

> Ewan Klein asked an excellent question on identifying specific demonstrations of the benefits of open data. 
> That made me wonder about a related question: what are the arguments against open data?

>From the top of my head, I can think of a few arguments  I've heard (valid or not)  why administrations don't "do" open data

- there is no clear demand / only a few people are occasionally interested in it
- people can just ask us and we'll just send the data, it works just fine
- we want to know who is using the data for what purposes
- it's a Marketing thing (IT) <=> it's an IT thing (Marketing)
- we already send our data to EuroStat and/or INSPIRE and/or ... so why yet another platform/project/whatever
- we cannot guarantee that this dataset will be updated regularly / continue to be available
- the data may not be correct, so who's responsible when something goes wrong ?
- we sell this data to companies, because our department needs to  (partially) fund itself
- we actually don't own the data ourselves (collected in a public-private cooperation, copyright / legal)
- no resources (time and/or budget and/or staff)
- it's "sensitive" data (e.g. deaths at hospitals), and people may draw the wrong conclusions / not be able to interpret them correctly
- we did a hack-a-thon, which was nice, but everyone went home and nothing else happened with the datasets
- nice, but it's not on top of the (political) agenda and we have to also do important project X, Y, Z first
- business case: it will cost _our department_  _now_, and _may_ lead to an unknown amount of cost savings for someone else
- the data is protected by a special law for privacy / business / security reasons


Best regards

Bart Hanssens
Federal Public Service ICT Belgium