Open Data Indices: Good and Evil | European Public Sector Information Platform

" ... We can highlight some popular Open Data rankings, measuring different things but sharing the same goal. In February 2012, we launched the first version of the PSI Scoreboard, our crowdsourced initiative to measure the status of PSI re-use throughout the 28 EU countries; in 2013, the World Wide Web Foundation started to analyse open data readiness, implementation and impact across 86 countries on the Open Data Barometer. In the same year, the Open Knowledge Foundation also launched the Open Data Index monitoring the global state of open data (now with information on 97 countries) ... An example of this is the differences between the Open Knowledge Foundation's Open Data Index and ePSI Platform's PSI scoreboard - these are an indication that any ranking can only be based on a set of metrics, and there is no agreement in what those metrics should be. For instance, Greece scores poorly in the OKFN Index (54) but scores well in ePSI Platform (4). Now let's ask which countries have a law stating that government contracts with their suppliers are only valid if they are published. If that were a metric Greece would be in a very short list of leading countries. Rather than assess which countries publish postcode data, switch the question to which countries publish their address file: UK would drop below Denmark and the Netherlands... and so on. It is clear that there is not a perfect methodology to follow ..."