Thoughts on Measuring the Value of Open Data

Open data is a worthwhile enterprise, regardless of cost

Last year, the federal open data portal, data.gov, registered it’s 200,000th data set. This milestone was the culmination of years of investment and shifting attitudes towards the open data movement. Broadly defined, the open data movement is a push towards sharing non-sensitive governmental data for free. But this shift inevitability elicits questions of operational cost. Data must be cleaned, scrubbed of sensitive information, and deployed sustainably. With constrained budgets and reduced headcounts, how do we measure the value of open data?

It’s easy to start thinking about creative ways to quantify the value of open data. One approach could be to count the number of mobile applications that use open data or tally up the value of companies who make use of open data. An example: Transport for London, London’s transportation agency, estimated that their open data has brings about $151M in economic value per year to the London metro year in time savings from third-party developed transit apps and technology-related employment. These approaches, however creative or interesting, largely miss the point of open data for two main reasons.

First, approaches to the value of open data often ground themselves in the current uses of open data. This is certainly a useful exercise and can help agencies tailor their data products to their end customers, but one of the grounding tenets of the open data movement is that the use cases are not always known in advance. Consider how the regulations.gov API was used to identify bots submitting comments to the FCC net neutrality regulatory changes or New York City’s traffic citation and mapping data found 2.2M erroneous parking tickets. The only way to understand the full uses of data is to release it to the public.

Second, and most importantly, transparency is paramount in democratic governance. Exposing business and scientific data enables accountability by citizenry and ultimately supports the efficient and effective delivery of government services. We should think about open data not as an addendum to governmental services but as a core function of government. This is the heart of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018, which requires the publishing of non-sensitive data by federal agencies .

This is not such a radical idea. We already require disclosures of campaign financial records, federal regulatory proposals, and other political and governmental documents. As governmental business data becomes structured and standardized, the logical next step is to include open data as part of current and established transparency processes.

But if we see open data as a core function of government, it should be treated as such. Recent legislation, while a step in the right direction, does not come with associated funds to execute on this mission. The result is that agencies are squeezed even tighter and execution may be sloppy. Until there are additional appropriations for these activities, the mission of federal agencies will ultimately suffer.