Open data in Italy, Austria, Estonia, France, Ireland, Romania and Slovenia
9. Implementation at national and local level
The implementation of open data at public administration level is still weak.
Even in countries that are committed to open data, a gap between intentions, declarations and implementation is evident.
The interviews carried out with public administrations reveal the lack of common implementation within each Member State and the need for better monitoring.
The most significant difficulties are similar across the countries:
- lack of technical infrastructure
- challenges in terms of data quality
- misaligned organisational priorities
- lack of expertise among public officers.
It is focused on boosting transparency as an anti-corruption measure in Romania and Italy, while other countries see open data as a vehicle for enhancing economic growth.
This dual nature of open data emerged when comparing the legal frameworks but it became crystal clear when looking at its implementation. In all of the examined countries, the public administrations seem to follow their own agendas in implementing the rules; no central monitoring is currently fully in place to standardise the practice.
In general, public administrations do not have internal
guidelines for implementing open data policies.
The lack of internal guidelines means that data published by public administrations are not uniform, the publication follows different procedures and there is no standard policy in term of publication format.
The
identity of the person responsible for publishing data
is also unclear, except in France and Ireland, which have
a more centralised system. Italy and Romania do have a
person responsible for publishing data connected with
anti-corruption policies, but this does not materialise in
at least a common standard across public administrations. The biggest issue is data cleanliness and quality:
data remains rather difficult for citizens to use.
In all of the examined countries, officers are trained to handle access requests, but they do not receive any specific training on open data. In particular, there is alack of training on the rationale behind open data; data are published because there is a duty to do so, with no clear perspective on the requirements of users.
As already anticipated, Italy, France, and Romania are required to publish all data on public tender procedures. In France, the obligation to publish a minimum set of data with a defined standard is too new to facilitate its evaluation in terms of implementation. In Italy, data are published according to anti-corruption policies that do not establish data standards. Only a summary table of the contracts awarded is published as a defined open format, but this occurs once a year. In Romania, the SICAP platform is designed to allow national authorities to check procurement, but it is not designed as a tool for enhancing transparency towards citizens (e.g. data are not downloadable in machine-readable format).
The connection between datasets published on the public administration websites or unpublished but available and the national data portal does not respond to standard rules. Many datasets are published and updated individually by public administrations, others are harvested daily from existing data catalogues; others are not transferred. In Italy, in particular, the proliferation of databases makes it unclear which data can be found and where. Data audits only seem to be in place in Ireland.
By now, in Italy, Romania, Slovenia and Estonia, public administrations respond to data requests but they are not proactive. When it is mandatory, data are published, but with a lack of foresight in terms of their usability. Some public administrations (e.g. that of the city of Milan in Italy) have started to be more proactive. Having learned by data requests that some data receive more attention from citizens, officers have started to consider proactively publishing this data, to respond to the interests of citizens and to reduce the number of access requests.