New report: Governing by rankings – How the Global Open Data Index helps advance the open data agenda
Danny Lämmerhirt - November 29, 2017 in Featured, Global Open Data Index, godi, GODI16, open data survey, research

Why does this research matter?
Global governance indices like GODI enjoy great popularity due to their capacity to count, calculate, and compare what is otherwise hardly comparable. A wealth of research – from science and technology studies to sociology of quantification and international policy – shows that the effects of governance indicators are complex (our report provides an extensive reading list). Different audiences can take up indices to different (unintended) ends. It is therefore paramount to trace the effects of governance indicators to inform their future design. The report argues that there are multiple ways of looking for ‘impacts’ depending on different audiences, and how they put GODI into practice. Does a comparative open data ranking like GODI help mobilise high-level policy commitments? Does it incentivise individual government agencies to adjust and improve the publication of open data? Does it open up spaces for discussion and deliberation between government and civil society? This thinking builds on an earlier report by Open Knowledge International arguing that indicators have different audiences, with different lived experiences, needs, and agendas. While any form of measurement needs to align with these needs to become actionable (which affects how the impact of indicators will take shape), it also needs to retain comparability.Our findings
We used Argentina, United Kingdom and Ukraine as case studies to represent different degrees of open data publication, economic development and political set-up. Our report, drawing from a series of twelve interviews and document analysis, suggests that GODI drives change primarily from within government. We assume this finding is partly due to our limited sample size. While key actors in the government are easy to identify, as open data publication is often one of their job responsibilities, further research is needed to identify more civil society actors and how they engage with GODI. Below we describe nine ways how GODI influences open data policy and publication.- Getting international visibility and achieving progress in country rankings or generally high ranking may incentivise and maintain high-level political support for open data, despite non-comparability of results across years.
- In the absence of open data legislation, GODI has been used by Argentinian government as a soft policy tool to pressure other government agencies to publish data.
- Government agencies tasked with implementing open data used GODI to reward and point out progress made by other agencies, but also flag blockages to high-level politicians.
- GODI sets standards what datasets to publish and sets a baseline for improvement. Outcomes are debatable around categories where the central government does not have easy political levers to publish data.
- GODI may be confounded with broader commitments to open government and used as an argument to reduce investment in other aspects of open government agenda. In the past, some high-level politicians presented high ranking in GODI as evidence of government transparency and obsoletion of other ways of providing government information.
- This effect may possibly be exacerbated by superficial media coverage that reports on the ranking without engaging with broader information and transparency policies. An analysis of Google News results suggests that journalists tend to reproduce (mostly politicians’) misconceptions and confound a good ranking in GODI with a high degree of government transparency and openness.
- Our findings suggest that individuals and organisations working around transparency and anti-corruption make little use of GODI due to a lack of detail and a misalignment with their specialised work tasks. For instance, Transparency International Ukraine uses the Transparent Public Procurement Rating to evaluate the legal framework, aside from the publication of open data.
- On the other hand, academics show interest to GODI to develop new governance indicators. They also often use country scores as a proxy for measuring open data availability.
- GODI has a potential for use in data journalism. Data journalism trainers may use it as a source of government data during their trainings.
