Strengthening Open Data Leadership in Government

A guest post from Felipe González-Zapata

Carla Bonina led an interesting discussion about the role of open data leaders in government and the relevance of leader networks for the transfer of experiences and knowledge on open data projects at the 3rd Open Data Conference (#iodc15 #leadership). Participants of this session included open data leaders such as Natalia Carfi from the Government of Chile and Virginia Pardo from the Government of Uruguay, as well as open data networks’ administrators such as Arnaud Sahuguet from Network of Innovators (The GovLab), Liz Carolan from the ODI Leaders’ Network (The ODI), and Mike Mora from The OAS E-Government Leaders’ Network – Red GEALC (The OAS).

During the first part of this session open data leaders shared their experiences of managing open data projects in their respective countries, highlighting the relevance of keeping connected to other leaders to share concerns, issues and solutions to common problems; “keep open as an open data leader, ask questions and be open to learn” suggested Natalia Carfi. In a similar position, Virginia Pardo claimed that we needed open data networks “to share failure and success; we don’t need to reinvent the wheel and we can also learn from others’ experiences”. Both also agreed that these types of practices are currently being carried out in Latin America, having regional meetings to share “knowledge, experience, passion and work”.

Later in this session, open data leaders’ network administrators also highlighted the importance of promoting and coordinating these networks in order to foster capacity building within governments to succeed in open data projects. Liz Carolan expressed that “Open data leaders feel isolated and alone, like following a trend of activism, while most of the countries share similar issues and challenges. Then, we identify the need for local and international networks”. In this sense, experiences such as the ODI open data network (which connects leaders from different countries across the world) can be an effective platform, which allows for open data leaders to build their own network, while giving them enough room to do it in the way they think may be most appropriate.

From a regional perspective, Mike Mora highlighted that the OAS coordinates America’s leaders from different levels of the public sector in E-government policies, such as officials, practitioners or young leaders. The E-government network coordinates leaders from North America, Latin America and the Caribbean “and we have learned to keep things as simple as possible; we acknowledge the diversity of our region, so we need methodologies to strengthen leadership from their own contexts and challenges but with a strong emphasis on capacity building”.

The last contribution was made by Arnaud Sahughet, who introduced the recently launched Network of Innovators from The GovLab. This innovative experience looks at creating networks of people with different skills, expertise and resources on open data and innovation across the world, fostering civic collaboration to innovate in the public sector.

The conversation was followed up by a set of interactive questions with the audience sharing their visions about open data leadership and networks. Participants agreed that leaders’ networks do require political commitment to allow open data champions to actively engage in these groups, which is often difficult since political high-level officials often do not perceive the value of these networks. Additionally, they also agreed that networks should keep a balance between getting advice or solutions to face particular challenges and generating discussion by using collective knowledge and experience to create new ideas and good practices.

Overall, the relevance of open data leaders’ networks is based on the idea of sharing skills and experience to solve common problems and challenges. Political support to invest time and effort in these networks is crucial but difficult to obtain, even in leading countries in the open data arena. How then can these networks expand to integrate more isolated leaders from developing countries? It might be worth exploring new alternatives to traditional leaders’ networks typologies, where new and more advanced leaders can create different dynamics of interaction. In these new alternatives, different scales of problems and sets of common issues and solutions can be integrated, but without missing that these would need to be context-dependant and, consequently, adapted to each particular reality.

We have also seen the relevance of having these leaders’ networks, which poses the question of how other actors of the open data value chain can be successfully integrated into these collaborative spaces? During the conference, one of the hot topics was the importance of developing a well-balanced and robust open data ecosystem in order to achieve long-term sustainable open data projects. In these ecosystems, different agents are involved from inside and outside the public sector, and networks to address their own issues (similar or different to what open data leaders need to face) would be also highly valued in order to push the movement forward. Accordingly, opportunities such as the Open Data Conference or other similar events facilitate networking and collaboration spaces, helping new practitioners’, activists’ or data journalists’ networks to be created and expanded to face global and local open data issues.