Martin Alvarez-Espinar, Engineer in Computer Science, is the Manager at the W3C Spanish Office. He has broad experience in Web standards development. Martín has worked as eGovernment consultant at CTIC since 2007, specialized in the Open Government field. He has participated in the development of over a dozen of Open Government Data initiatives in Europe, and he is part of various working groups at W3C and in the European Commission’s Joinup, for the standardization of technologies in the Open Data an PSI re-use field.

After a decade working with open data we have seen hundreds of projects developed following different approaches. Some of them driven by strategic commitments from the top, and most of them led by individuals (small teams within the government) fighting against heads of departments too much worried in preserving the privacy of the information they manage. Some initiatives focused on the technological excellence, and others just interested in releasing a Web portal containing as much information as possible. There is no bad open data if ‘data’ and ‘open’ are on the same page, but subtle oversights in the design and implementation of the strategy may determine the success level of the initiative.

Fortunately, most of the open data initiatives in the world were somehow influenced by early good quality initiatives as reference —i.e., data.gov, data.gov.uk, data.gouv.fr. This brought into the scene a homogeneous picture of open data with similarities: how the portal should be like, what licenses should be applied to datasets, how hackathons and app contests should be organized, etc. Of course, not all the initiatives follow the same foundations and many of them failed to achieve the expected results. Success is never guaranteed.

The open data chain is as strong as its weakest link, and we should not miss any stage of the lifecycle: from the strategy definition and set up —including policy-making, organizational, and technical tasks— to the communication with stakeholders feeding back the roadmap. Something this chain is already broken at the beginning.

Seasoned governments adapt their strategies based on lessons learned in a trial-and-error process. On the other hand, newbies try to follow the mainstream, embracing the recommendations of the more-advanced communities. This learning process to enhance the open data and PSI re-use ecosystem around the world may be facilitated by common guidelines and best practices.

Institutions and experts around the world have written high-level and technical guidelines for publishing and reusing PSI. Among these documents: the European Commission’s Guidelines on licences, datasets and charging; the Open Knowledge’s Open Data Handbook; the European Data Portal’s Open Data Goldbook; the US Memorandum on Open Data Policy-Managing; the Sunlight Foundation’s Open Data Policy Guidelines; the Open Data Ireland Best Practice Handbook; the Norwegian Open Data Guidelines; the Flanders’ Open Data Handbook; the Romanian Open Data Publication Guide; the Swedish Guide on Re-use of Public Sector Data; the Open Government Data Germany study; the Brazilian Open Data Toolkit; the Scottish Open Data Resource Pack; the Spanish guidelines on Open Data and PSI Re-use; the Italian Guidelines for valorizing Public Sector Information; the Catalan guide on Government Data Openness and Re-Use; the City of Philadelphia’s Open Data Guidebook; the Open Data Playbook for Government; the Canadian Open Data 101; COMSODE’s Methodologies for open data; and the W3C Data on the Web Best Practices.

Contributing with this open data harmonization movement, the Share PSI 2.0 thematic network recently released a document compiling good (and best) practices from the community. Hundreds of invited experts took part in a five workshops across Europe (Samos, Lisbon, Timişoara, Krems, and Berlin), sharing stories and use cases on various open-data-related topics such as publication, re-use, business models, or policy-making. These real experiences were collected by the network members and structured following the requirements of the EU Directive (2013/37/EU) on PSI Re-use. These guides are being localized and adapted to cover local and specific needs of regions, so we will be able to download them in many additional languages soon.

I know, I know… Too many documents, it’s true. Also, they contain redundancies and many similarities, but this is a good sign. These guidelines are essential tools to drive the evolution of open data towards excellence.