Disclaimer: I work for Liip, the company that build the Open Data pilot portal for Switzerland. I’m one of the developers of the portal. On the other hand, I’m a member of the opendata.ch association.
Although I’m a relatively new member of the Open Data community, I use and work with Open Data in different forms for many years now. I’m a keen enthusiast of the underlying idea of openness, collaboration and knowledge sharing. But the whole idea of Open Government Data (OGD) in Switzerland is currently broken. There are numerous problems and it probably all boils down to false expectations.
To make new data known to the public, often the first idea is to make an app contest. At first this sounds like a good idea: People working with your data and creating an app. It sounds like a win-win situation. Some may even think it’s cheap way to get a lot of apps. The problem is, that contests have winners. And when there are winners, there must be losers. Your data is much too valuable, and every contribution is too important to waste time to choose a winner.
The goal of an OGD data owner should be, that a lot of people know and use your data. This makes it worth to create this data in the first place. It doesn’t matter if it is used by a special interest group or by an app used by millions of people.
On the other side, hackathons provide a good environment to play around, talk with different people and hack along. This is the kind of thing we need. Please understand that after such an event there are tons of ideas around. Prototypes, unfinished apps, visualizations etc. This is all very valuable. Don’t expect a bunch of polished, ready-to-use apps as a result.
Most data owners consider it a failure if nothing happens after they release data. This is just plain wrong. The whole point of Open Data is to open your data. It’s done. It’s out there. Anyone that is interested can use this data. You never know when this is. Eventually someone creates a mashup, where you dataset is the missing piece.
What if this does not happen? It doesn’t matter. Maybe the time was not right. Maybe this dataset is just not interesting enough. But that doesn’t mean it was not worth to open it.
But of course there some things that you can and should do. Here is my little list of DOs and DON’Ts: