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Making Sense of Open Data Policies: a Self-Evaluation Tool for Public Administrations

The goal of this paper is to put forward a pragmatic approach to the debated question of open data impact assessment, acknowledging the wide agreement on the difficulty to secure a reliable method for objective measurement. The paper addresses the need for a viable method to monitor open data policies through a qualitative evaluation of their impacts on administered territories. To do so, it proposes a tool to help public administrations, especially local governments, to perform such evaluation autonomously and in a quick and simple way, through a questionnaire detecting the perception on the effects produced by shared information, and a form to calculate the overall costs for data management. This self-evaluation activity aims at encouraging internal discussion and information sharing within the administration. The tool was developed and tested in Italy with altogether 12 interlocutors (public administrations and open data experts) and is available to all public organisations.