Open data in Brazil – different positions for the same metric

 

By Vagner Diniz, PhD researcher at FGV and specialist in Open Data, Electronic Government and the Internet of Things

 
 
The transparency of data, processes, people and companies has never been so necessary and so debated, questioned and valued in the country as it is today. And when it comes to public transparency, one of the defining characteristics is the quantity and quality of data that are available and accessible to the population. And how far is Brazil in this item, also known as “open data”?
 
Brazilians are very fond of rankings to compare themselves with others, either to justify boastful behavior or to reinforce their mutt complex. When it comes to “open data”, it is not very different, Brazil continues to be evaluated by society and the media according to its position in different rankings, according to convenience or political tendency.
 
Brazil occupies different positions in the different existing rankings on transparency and “open data”. Despite the different approaches, methodology and objectives of each classification, the data deserve a careful evaluation that will be done in due course. In this text, it is important to understand the differences between each of them, to detail a little more the objective of each research and the evaluation given to Brazil in each of them.
 
The World Wide Web Foundation's Open Data Barometer (ODB), published this month, evaluated 115 countries and placed Brazil in 18th place, down one position in the ranking compared to last year. This analysis aims to measure how ready the country is to support and sustain open data initiatives and actions, whether it actually implements open data programs or is just on paper, and whether the implemented program actually has a real impact on business, politics and civil society. The ODB methodology envisages data collected by self-completion by governments and verification by experts afterwards.
 
In its 2016 ODIN annual inventory, Open Data Watch ranked Brazil 67th. position, well behind Sweden, Norway and the Czech Republic, the highest scorers. Among the countries with average scores, in addition to Brazil, Nigeria, Kosovo and Cameroon stood out. And among the lowest scores are Haiti and Madagascar. In this latest edition, the institute added 48 countries to the study, including the richest OECD nations, for a total of 173 countries. Brazil was in the 67th position, with an average of 43 points, obtaining 44 points in coverage and 42 in opening. In the world ranking, the average was 39 points. The objective of the ODIN is to globally assess the extent to which official statistics institutions (in Brazil, IBGE) are committed to publishing basic indicators in quantity, disaggregation and open format as a guarantee of access and the possibility of full reuse by the population. The methodology provides for the assessment directly on the website of the official statistical organization by a single assessor.
 
The Global Open Data Index (GODI), by Open Knowledge International, placed Brazil in the 7th position in 2017, well above the 12th position obtained in 2016. The objective of the GODI is to know how countries in general publish “open data”. Some criteria taken into account in the analysis are data collection, the practice of publishing and disseminating them, the ease of finding the data and the presentation format, which sometimes prevents its reuse. GODI creates insights for agencies that publish public data to identify where their biggest problems are. The methodology provides for an evaluation carried out by civil society researchers with the possibility of an open review later.
 
Looking at the results of these publications presupposes understanding the difference in their objectives and methodologies. The three surveys seek to identify whether countries publish “open data” according to a minimum list of categories and whether this data is disaggregated enough to reuse it. However, none of them is concerned with the quality of the data, only one checks whether “open data” has an impact on society and the universe researched is not the same for everyone. And the most important is the difference in the collection methodology. While the ODB uses a form with government auto-response, the GODI provides data from the civil society point of view and the ODIN focuses only on official statistical institutions, such as the IBGE.
 
Therefore, there is little care when looking only at the numbers and position in the rankings of such organizations.
 
http://opendatabarometer.org/barometer/
http://odin.opendatawatch.com/
https://index.okfn.org/about/
https://www.europeandataportal.eu/sites/default/files/edp_landscaping_insight_report_n2_2016.pdf