Open Data Culture: Sustaining organisational support for open data programs

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29 Jan 2020

Open Data Culture: Sustaining organisational support for open data programs

The international research community makes use of a tremendous amount of open data funded and published by government sources. Open government data serves to inform many important areas of research and public policy impacting agriculture, adaptation to climate change, energy, natural resource management, and responses to natural disasters. A myriad of new opportunities using public data has the potential to improve societies and economies, while the risks of not modernizing data policies, frameworks and protections for individuals and communities, may be catastrophic. There is a gap, however, between the perceived value and urgency of data-driven research and evidence-based policy, and the data culture required to realize those objectives. Research communities may miss opportunities to inform data policies and legislation that subsequently have negative consequences for their community. Research can be hampered at the policy level without a feedback mechanism from the research community itself. The present study sets out two original case studies in Australia and New Zealand to analyze the role of emerging data communities and leadership to create sustainable data-sharing programs. Public service executives in data-intensive organisations are actively looking for bodies that will lead the way on data sharing and release and also address the gap in the capacity of agencies to manage, collect and turn digital content into findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) data. Guided by the literatures on emerging data communities and social psychology, I identify how federal advisors and policymakers are increasingly informed by research organisations, including the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), Australian National University (ANU), Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and GeoScience Australia, to improve the way federally funded data is shared on the public Web. 

Name & surname: 
Bernadette Hyland-Wood
Scientific Discipline / Research Area: 
Social Sciences/Political Science
Affiliation: 
The University of Queensland, School of Political Science and International Studies
  • Rob Hooft's picture

    Author: Rob Hooft

    Date: 09 Apr, 2020

    ELIXIR, the life science data infrastructure in Europe that I am associated with, participates in the "Global Biodata Coalition".  I think you are pursuing largely parallel goals. I will make some colleagues aware of your poster.

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