Taking Advantage of Open Data to Foster Innovation, Transparency and Civic Participation

"But perhaps most importantly, the success of open data in Myanmar hinges on the government’s attitude towards it. Open-washing is a phrase used to describe situations where institutions pay lip service to open data as a public relations move. This might involve releasing some datasets while restricting access to other crucial datasets that might be politically sensitive, or releasing data that is incomplete, inaccurate, too aggregated (i.e. summarized very broadly, without being broken down into finer details) or otherwise not useful; for example, when the 2014 Myanmar census data on religion was finally released in 2016 after being delayed for a year, it turned out that the data was only disaggregated to the state or region level, unlike the rest of the census data, which was available down to the level of townships, and in the case of population figures, even down to the village tract level. Without commitment from the highest levels of government and a true belief that transparency is beneficial for all, open-washing is a trap that many governments and organizations can easily step into."