Oxford, 26 August 2010

The Open Data Impact Study was an exploratory study into open government data (OGD) use and is meant as a wide-reaching preliminary work.

The research questions were:

• Who is using OGD?
• How is data from data.gov.uk being used in practice?
• What forms of democratic engagement and public sector reform does OGD support in practice?
• What are the potential implications of OGD use for future democratic engagement and public sector reform?

and the work is making contributions in three areas (quoted from dissertation):

"Firstly, it outlines a model for thinking about different processes of OGD use, based on careful analysis of real-world use cases.

Secondly, it sketches connections that can be drawn between OGD and models of democratic engagement and public sector reform. This lays the foundations for future studies, including those oriented towards normative assessment of the relationship between OGD and civic change.

Thirdly, in focusing on OGD from the end-use perspective, rather than more common perspectives of data and tool providers, and in addressing the democratic and public service arguments for OGD distinct from economic benefit arguments, it contributes to a rebalancing of the OGD debate towards civic over technological or economic concerns."

The suggested focus on end-use perspective echoes with the notion that in taking on societal problems a design-approach could be beneficial. As the design approach takes the user-perspective and ability to act as starting point, as well as reciprocal aspects and trust aspects of relationships between different stakeholders.

The usage perspective being put above the more instrumental and currently more dominant perspectives of data and tool providers also means, as stated in an earlier blog posting by Tim Davies, that the social infrastructure around a open government data project (like the catalogue at data.gov.uk) is at least as important as the technological infrastructure.

The entire Open Data Impact study is available on-line, where it can be commented on or downloaded in PDF.