The Challenges of Open Data Movement for Education: What is the Say of Young Employees and Students in Croatia?

This paper aims to shed light on how students and young employees in Croatia assess their education for open data and what is their opinion on the compliance of the central Open Data Portal with the needs of young people as well as how they evaluate open data policy related to the young people in Croatia. This research highlights the lack of technical knowledge as a serious obstacle to the productive use of open data. As many as 56% of respondents from companies that have undergone digital transformation believe that they do not have enough knowledge to participate in open data projects, and the same scepticism is expressed by 59.6% of non-technical respondents and 45.7% of students. The data presented in this paper is part of a broader empirical research on the impact of digitalization on the transformation of the Croatian economy, carried out by the author in late 2018 on a sample of 51 young employees from 10 companies in the city of Zagreb and 70 students from 16 technical and non-technical Faculties of Zagreb University.

Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition: A Literature Review and Proposed Conceptual Framework

This paper begins by locating the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition project (GODAN) in the context of wider debates in the open data movement by first reviewing the literature on open data and open data for agriculture and nutrition (ODAN). The review identifies a number of important gaps and limitations in the existing literature. There has been no independent evaluation of who most benefits or who is being left behind regarding ODAN. There has been no independent evaluation of gender or diversity in ODAN or of the development outcomes or impacts of ODAN. The existing research on ODAN is over-reliant on key open data organisations and open data insiders who produce most of the research. This creates bias in the data and analysis. The authors recommend that these gaps are addressed in future research. The paper contributes a novel conceptual ‘SCOTA’ framework for analysing the barriers to and drivers of open data adoption, which could be readily applied in other domains. Using this framework to review the existing literature highlights the fact that ODAN research and practice has been predominantly supply-side focused on the production of open data. The authors argue that if open data is to ‘leave no one behind’, greater attention now needs to be paid to understanding the demand-side of the equation and the role of intermediaries. The paper argues that there is a compelling need to improve the participation of women, people living with disabilities, and other marginalised groups in all aspects of open data for agriculture and nutrition. The authors see a need for further research and action to enhance the capabilities of marginalised people to make effective use of open data. The paper concludes with the recommendation that an independent strategic review of open data in agriculture and nutrition is overdue. Such a review should encompass the structural factors shaping the process of ODAN; include a focus on the intermediary and demand-side processes; and identify who benefits and who is being left behind.

Corpus Phonetics

Semiautomatic analysis of digital speech collections is transforming the science of phonetics. Convenient search and analysis of large published bodies of recordings, transcripts, metadata, and annotations—up to three or four orders of magnitude larger than a few decades ago—have created a trend towards “corpus phonetics,” whose benefits include greatly increased researcher productivity, better coverage of variation in speech patterns, and crucial support for reproducibility. The results of this work include insights into theoretical questions at all levels of linguistic analysis, along with applications in fields as diverse as psychology, medicine, and poetics, as well as within phonetics itself. Remaining challenges include still-limited access to the necessary skills and a lack of consistent standards. These changes coincide with the broader Open Data movement, but future solutions will also need to include more constrained forms of publication motivated by valid concerns for privacy, confidentiality, and intellectual property.

The State of Open Data: Histories and Horizons

Its been ten years since open data first broke onto the global stage. Over the past decade, thousands of programmes and projects around the world have worked to open data and use it to address a myriad of social and economic challenges. Meanwhile, issues related to data rights and privacy have moved to the centre of public and political discourse. As the open data movement enters a new phase in its evolution, shifting to target real-world problems and embed open data thinking into other existing or emerging communities of practice, big questions still remain. How will open data initiatives respond to new concerns about privacy, inclusion, and artificial intelligence? And what can we learn from the last decade in order to deliver impact where it is most needed? The State of Open Data brings together over 60 authors from around the world to address these questions and to take stock of the real progress made to date across sectors and around the world, uncovering the issues that will shape the future of open data in the years to come.

Civil Society and the Open Data Movement

The GODORT International Documents Task Force held a pre-conference at the 2013 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago titled “International Statistics: Helping Library Users Understand the Global Community,”1 with which I was only marginally involved. But I was asked by the committee if it was worth presenting on Nongovernmental Organization (NGO) data, to which I replied it was not: most civil society organizations were not yet in the business of repurposing publicly available data or publishing their own.

Transitioning “Open Data” from a NOUN to a VERB

Research assessment is the process or a metric which aims to assess the impact of the research study. The assessment may include the process that aims in evaluating the quality or intellect of a researcher given the notion that qualified scientists are more productive and may drive quality research in the process of Scholarly Communications. Over time, we have become used to equating the quality of the research with the quality or performance of the researcher. The emphasis over publications may encourage unethical practices, Which may be extrapolated to the evolution of problems like, Irreproducibility, Scientific fraud. Over the past century, a myriad of activities has been undertaken or are still being taken to improve the ways by which research can be assessed. Beginning with the first evolution of the Impact Factor and more recently other, Citation metrics, Altmetrics, etc. have resulted from this work. In this article, we discuss around the myriad of strategies that may play a significant role in the cultural transition of Science and Scientists that is still ongoing. And also highlight the reasons why we should not only look at research assessment but should also be keen on researcher evaluations and differentiate them from one another. Reflecting this, the title of the article signals how the strategies that researchers may need to consider might impact the way they interact with the Open Data movement.

Transitioning “Open Data” from a NOUN to a VERB

Research assessment is the process or a metric which aims to assess the impact of the research study. The assessment may include the process that aims in evaluating the quality or intellect of a researcher given the notion that qualified scientists are more productive and may drive quality research in the process of Scholarly Communications. Over time, we have become used to equating the quality of the research with the quality or performance of the researcher. The emphasis over publications may encourage unethical practices, Which may be extrapolated to the evolution of problems like, Irreproducibility, Scientific fraud. Over the past century, a myriad of activities has been undertaken or are still being taken to improve the ways by which research can be assessed. Beginning with the first evolution of the Impact Factor and more recently other, Citation metrics, Altmetrics, etc. have resulted from this work. In this article, we discuss around the myriad of strategies that may play a significant role in the cultural transition of Science and Scientists that is still ongoing. And also highlight the reasons why we should not only look at research assessment but should also be keen on researcher evaluations and differentiate them from one another. Reflecting this, the title of the article signals how the strategies that researchers may need to consider might impact the way they interact with the Open Data movement.

Open data in Kazakhstan: incentives, implementation and challenges

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the promising potential of open data in Kazakhstan to boost public sector innovations and trace the emergence of the related civic engagement initiatives in order to understand how it affects the democratization of political communication processes in a typical developing country. Design/methodology/approach This is a case study research which begins with a brief history of the official open data project and then investigates various political and socioeconomic drivers, corresponding regulatory acts, the leading role of the key stakeholders and policy entrepreneurs in the diffusion of the open data movement as well as the main challenges associated with the advance of the open government concept in Kazakhstan, while various independent open data-driven projects provide a rich empirical basis for the analysis. Findings Open data provides new opportunities to promote civic engagement and e-participation but does not affect the fundamentals of the political system nor advances democratic institutions in a typical developing country. The traditional directives could paradoxically be effective in advancing open data even in a less collaborative political culture. The unitary administrative context is conducive for the development of the ICT-driven public sector initiatives as a single platform. The existence of independent developers is crucial in promoting various open data-driven projects and sharing related expertise. The open data movement creates a favorable atmosphere for the participation of the non-governmental sector in the sphere. Research limitations/implications This case study is primarily focused on the analysis of the open data movement at the national level of government, taking into account the unitary structure of the public administration system existing in Kazakhstan, which apparently has a crucial fundamental effect on the realization of any e-government system in this country. In this respect, the main limitation of the research is that the possible existence of various open data-driven projects at the local levels that hypothetically may have a different set of political and socioeconomic drivers and challenges was excluded from the final equation, which provides a new window for the future research in the area. Practical implications The results of the research could be used by e-government practitioners and policymakers in evaluating and improving the operation of the open data-driven projects in many developing countries. Social implications The author of the paper tried to develop a universal framework of the case study research that could be used in investigating the open data phenomenon not only in Kazakhstan but also in the context of other developing and transitional countries, especially in analyzing the apparitional emergence of the unique networking activities among the key stakeholders of the open data movement, i.e. policymakers, NGOs, businesses, developers, mass media and citizens. In addition, the results of the analysis could be used in testing the political and socioeconomic implications of the highly centralized e-government approach in the realization of the open data concept in a number of other typical unitary states. Originality/value In scientific works, the open data phenomenon is usually analyzed in the context of the most developed and democratic countries of the world with a vast majority of case studies being focused only on North America and Europe, forgetting that it is a global trend. In contrast to the traditional trends in the academic literature, the author of the paper studies the realization of the concept in an unusual context, resorting to the case study of a typical emerging and post-totalitarian nation such as Kazakhstan and focusing on the analysis of the key drivers and challenges in the diffusion of the open data concept in an attempt to answer the ultimate question: whether it is really harnessed by the members of civil society to promote civic engagement and e-participation.