Today the third edition of the global Open Data Barometer was released by the World Wide Web Foundation. 92 countries and their open data availability were examined. According to the World Wide Web Foundation over half of the studied countries have open data initiatives. But less than 10 percent of government data is open. Our question is: How did the availability of open data progress in the European countries and which countries are examples for others?
To measure the open data progress and performances the World Wide Web Foundation uses implementation and impact indicators. More and more countries are releasing their data as open data, but on a global level progress on the number of truly open datasets is stalling. And there is a growing gap between haves and have nots. The high-income countries have a lot of open data, while a lot of African countries do not. Furthermore open data is more than organizing a one-time hackathon. Governments need to adopt a long term open by default culture.
What about Europe?
But for the occasion of TransparencyCamp Europe we want to take a closer look at the results of the European countries. The score is based upon open data readiness, implementation and impact. The top 10 is filled with 5 European countries. With the United Kingdom having the best score, followed by France (2), Denmark (5), the Netherlands (7) and Sweden (9). France has made progress and made it from the third position to the shared second position together with the USA.
| Position | Rank Change | Country | Score | Readiness | Implementation | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | UK | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| 2 | 0 | USA | 81.89 | 97 | 76 | 76 |
| 2 | 2 | France | 81.64 | 97 | 76 | 74 |
| 4 | 3 | Canada | 80.36 | 89 | 84 | 67 |
| 5 | 4 | Denmark | 76.62 | 77 | 77 | 78 |
| 6 | -2 | New Zealand | 76.33 | 87 | 62 | 87 |
| 7 | -1 | Netherlands | 74.96 | 90 | 68 | 70 |
| 8 | 9 | Korea | 71.18 | 95 | 64 | 58 |
| 9 | -6 | Sweden | 69.25 | 88 | 60 | 64 |
| 10 | 0 | Australia | 67.99 | 84 | 77 | 39 |
The lowest ranking EU-members are Hungary (50), Slovakia (36) and Greece (33). The rest is in between. Which is not a very bad score for the EU member states, but much can be improved from policy to impact. And when you look closely most countries do not have good open data priorities for the subnational level. Most capital and bigger cities do release open data and have an agenda, but the rest of the country is not releasing a lot of data. Even though the local level is the government closest to the citizens.
You can make a difference!
Unconference, June 1 in Amsterdam
Join us at the TransparencyCamp Europe Unconference on June 1 in Amsterdam, where you can find people from all over Europe interested in topics like open (government) data, transparency and civic tech.
App Competition, deadline May 1
Also check out the TransparencyCamp App Competition. Are you a developer and have you created/improved an application which uses open data coming from within the EU in the past months? Or do you still want to participate and can you create a (basic) application before May 1? Check out the conditions! If you need inspiration or need help finding open data, then take a look at our datablogs. Nominees will pitch their application at the unconference and the grand winner will receive a flight and tickets to TransparencyCamp in the USA.