Open Data Charter's public consultation: Measurement Guide

Policy and Research
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Hi!

A recurring point in the community has been the overlap between the different measurement tools for open data: the Global Open Data Index, the Open Data Barometer, Open Data Watch, etc. They all measure different things, despite sharing some similarities. What are the most important things to measure and what for?

To tackle this problem, the Open Data Charter has created a draft document titled “Measurement Guide”, which is open for public consultation until March 26th, 2018. To participate, just open the Google Docs link and leave your comment before the deadline.

More information is available on this post. I suppose @anab and @dannylammerhirt can also help if you have questions, considering they are co-chairs of the Measurement and Accountability Working Group of the Open Data Charter.

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Hi Herrmann,

Thanks for creating this topic. We are cross-posting the Measurement Guide on blog.okfn.org later today, and were planning to open up this topic for discussion with the GODI community.

You are spot on with your observation why we created the Measurement Guide.

One motivation was to understand where existing measurements overlap and where they differ. More generally yet, we wanted to bring transparency into the definitions underpinning our indicators. For example, do existing indicators only look at the mere existence of open data policies (a boolean yes/no question), or are there qualitative judgements involved when a legal tool qualifies as a “good” policy.

As past discussions with GODI have shown, our community is often not entirely clear about these qualitative judgements, or how a final score was achieved. Since measurements set quasi-standards what counts as “good” open data, we think it is important to shine light on what indicators actually measure.

We would love to hear from you and the entire GODI community!

  • Governments: Which indicators are most useful to assess your work on open data and why?

  • Civil society: In what ways do you find existing indicators useful to hold your government to account?

  • Researchers: Do you know measurements and assessments that are well-suited to understand the Charter commitments?

I’d also like to highlight that besides a Measurement Guide and an indicator table, we have provided a methodology section where we explain our approach, and our raw data in two formats (Google docs, and a Google spreadsheet)

@herrmann, if that’s fine I’ll also create a cross-post in our GODI 2016 category.

Best wishes and don’t hesitate to get in touch via pm, or in the Measurement Guide draft directly!

Danny

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Hi, @dannylammerhirt! Thanks for the additional information!

I intend to take a deeper look into the document and share my thoughts about its contents when I can.

By all means, please do. I was already considering doing that when I wrote this post.

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I’m very much looking forward to hear your thoughts :slight_smile:

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