“Putting public data in the hands of the public to improve the functioning of democracy”

Tribune. How is the vaccination campaign progressing? How many new contaminations per day? Are the intensive care units saturated? So many questions that we ask ourselves every day and which require clear, quantified and unambiguous answers.

Times of crisis create a greater need for transparency with regard to governments. In the age of data, this observation is even truer: everyone is used to simply accessing precise data that allows them to make better decisions, from the fluidity of road traffic to the cardiovascular impact. of a workout. We would like to be able to find out so easily about the impact of a stimulus policy or on public health issues.

Article reserved for our subscribers Read also Covid-19: the crucial issue of public data

Putting public data in the hands of the public to improve the functioning of democracy: this is the goal of “open data”, that is to say the making available to all of data held by a government body or no. According to the “Open Data Maturity Report 2020” of the European Commission, France is one of the good students in this area. A downside: despite an effective “Open Government” strategy, the consultation of public data remains mainly the task of experts, analysts and other raw data enthusiasts. The ideal of data for all is still a long way off.

Interoperability, a crucial issue for open data

For the public authorities, the question is crucial: the opening of data makes it possible to renew the engagement of citizens in political life. A rich legislative framework has thus been put in place to institutionalize the publication of data, like the law for a digital republic of October 7, 2016.

To enter the framework of open data, data must not simply be available and accessible, but must be able to be reused by anyone: this implies a particular legal status, but also technical specificities. Data is standardized to facilitate their integration with other data sets: this is interoperability, a crucial issue for open data.

Article reserved for our subscribers Read also Gifts, appointments and amendment proposals: twenty-five measures to better control lobbies in the National Assembly

This interoperability, however, concerns users who have the technical skills to manipulate the data tables. For the general public, this criterion has only a limited impact: the uninitiated still depend on the goodwill of data experts. No offense to tech lovers, the sharing of public information does not date from the digital revolution.

You have 49.98% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.