Hope for a new opening of public data

The health crisis has highlighted the governance of public data as an essential task to provide open data, which allow researchers to generate public value and also give confidence to citizens about the figures that are released regarding circumstances that affect them. That is why the Regional Open Data Barometer for Latin America and the Caribbean (2020) states that “Governments must invest steadily and sustainably in teams that guide and implement open data policies at all levels of government.”
Does it matter who governs public data?
From the end of March 2020, citizens witnessed multiple lack of access and openness to information on infection data, data were made available without clear formats, even changing these formats in a whimsical way. 
Therefore, it is important to have a data governance that is independent, professional and has sufficient powers to coordinate the efforts of the different public departments in this important task.
Why open data can improve people’s lives?
Governing data can help us improve and even save lives, since working with evidence in public policy has become key, as evidenced by cases both outside and inside our country. Some examples can be reviewed in: the management at the national level of traceability that south Korea highlights, as well as at the subnational level the cases of the government of Aragon with its Covid open data visualizer. In Chile, at the national and local level, the municipality of Renca highlighted the contagion traceability project of the Centinela project, generating evidence for decision-making and at the same time access to information, which helps improve citizen trust.
How do states use open data?
Experts highlight at least three roles on the part of the state in using data. First, “enable” through a comprehensive legal and regulatory framework that allows the extraction, security and availability of data. This will allow the development of the data economy, maximizing the value of these.
The second is to “use” the data in the elaboration, development and monitoring of public policies obtaining more evidence for decision making; enabling the provision of public services, coordination and optimization of resources.
 Third, “promote” the use of open data in the community to improve management, increase productivity and create entrepreneurship; On an exemplary basis, the availability of open data on the efficacy of medicines would make it possible to improve those that already exist and develop new drugs. The latter is the least developed in the region, but it is no less relevant.
Chile in the international perspective
Now, when we compare Chile at the level of digital government with the OECD countries (2020), in the field of the public sector driven by data, our country is well below the average, obtaining a 0.26 of 0.44, consecrating itself penultimate in the long and extensive list of member countries and demonstrating four main shortcomings. One of them is that the government still does not take advantage of the data having to promote in the short, medium and long term the development of a trained public sector, validating public data as an elementary piece for the co-creation of policies and services by evidence. Another is the absence of a strategic vision that leverages the multiple uses of data as an asset of public value; in addition, the lack of adherence to values and ethical principles for the management and reuse of data, overcoming biases to guarantee equitable and inclusive public policies and decisions, strengthening their legitimacy and citizen trust. The last is the lack of intersectoral data management practices and initiatives, in which gaps are generated between availability, standards and concrete activities.
According to the 2020 Regional Open Data Barometer, Chile ranks 6th out of 24 countries analyzed. While this denotes progress, there is still some way to go.
What indicators are considered when analysing a country’s progress on open data?
The Latin American Barometer considers as indicators the preparation, implementation and impact of theOpen data.
The OECD Open Data Index (2019), explores data governance models from national data strategies, central data standards and data exchange platforms.
Among the findings of the report, it mentions that Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, have progressed or are progressing in the direction of global data strategies, adopting open, inclusive, iterative, collective and value-based approaches for their definition, implementation, evaluation and change. If anything, the leader of this select group is Estonia facing four main challenges: data collection, protection, growth and provision.
Governance models:
The OECD index develops a holistic governance approach that can be applied from the national level to the local level, generating flexibility and scalability for the extraction and delivery of value from data; in which governments build a solid foundation of data governance, enabling the implementation of coherent policies, defining reliable and secure environments for ethical sharing and reuse of data. The model is based on three premises: a) uniting the government as a whole; (b) enable government as a platform and; c) build greater trust in government, from a national data strategy and clear institutional leadership structures, that manages to map the entire flow of data, barriers and main opportunities to unlock the value of data.
The route to follow in Chile
We believe that the progress in implementation of the cybersecurity agency, plus the urgency in the project of the data protection agency, the improvement of the Transparency law, together with the consecration of digital rights that are present in the current draft of the New Constitution; incorporate new pillars to governance that must have a multilevel coordination that considers different state agencies such as the Council for Transparency, the digital government division, SII, Civil Registry, or the Ministry of Sciences. 
Additionally, the update of the digital transformation law 2.0 is already underway, forcing among some things to implement interoperability up to the municipal level. To this is added the update of the active transparency instructions seem to generate fertile soil for a new route on the promotion of open data (from the local to the national), considering the entire cycle of public data, from its creation to multiple uses and destruction.
The corollary leads us to understand that a challenge for the digital transformation of the State is to promote strategies that overcome the paradigm of opening data without clear objectives (opening by default), to advance in generating quality data that serve for better decisions with evidence and the generation of new public goods and services, We are talking about a new paradigm of openness with purpose, which is based on national public data governance, enabling public-private cross-sectoral exchange.
The economic and democratic reactivation will depend in part on the benefit that the countries of the region can take from the process of industrial revolution 4.0. It is a state imperative to improve AI or the use of vulnerable algorithms in the face of poor quality data circulating, it is a state imperative to improve them!

Original source in Spanish