Understanding Barriers to Open Government Data | Open Knowledge Foundation Blog

"Earlier in the year, as part of my on-going research on open data, I ran a survey exploring the barriers to open government data. I was seeking to understand how the open data community perceived potential barriers to realizing value from open government data. I believe the topic of barriers (although may be not as ‘glamorous’ as other areas of open data) was and remains an import area to explore. First, to better articulate the challenges faced by the open data community – as the initial wave of enthusiasm for open data is met by the practicalities of realizing its promise. Secondly, better articulation of the barriers will hopefully enable holistic, socio-technical approaches to overcoming these barriers to emerge ... 

Some preliminary survey results

233 people participated in the survey from across the international open data community bringing perspectives from the public, private, academic and non-profit sectors. The majority of participants worked in Europe or North America. The survey participants tended to agree that the statements presented in the survey were (in his or her experience or opinion) barriers to realising value from open government data. This tendency, as shown in the graphs in the presentation below, is not too surprising for many reasons. The most prominent reason, from my perspective, being that the open data agenda calls for large-scale social and technical change across multiple organisations with potentially competing interests. I now pick out three initial findings from more detailed analysis of the survey results.  [1] The open government data community seems focused on supply side barriers, and is more sceptical about demand side barriers ...  [2] There are contentious issues around some politicised aspects of the open government data agenda ...  [3] There are some differences in the perceptions of barriers to open government data across sectors ..."