The Daily Shaping of State Transparency: Standards, Machine-Readability and the Configuration of Open Government Data Policies

Abstract

While many governments are now committed to release Open Government Data under non-proprietarystandardized formats, less attention has been given to the actual consequences of these standardsfor knowledge workers. Unpacking the history of three open data standards (CSV, GTFS, IATI), thispaper shows what is actually happening when these standards are enacted in the work practices ofbureaucracies. It is built on participant-observer enquiry and interviews focussed on the back rooms ofopen data, and looking specifi cally at the invisible work necessary to construct open datasets. It showsthat the adoption of open standards is increasingly becoming an indicator of the advancement of opendata programmes. Enacting open standards involves much more than simple technical operations, itoperates a quiet and localised transformation of bureaucracies, in which the decisions of data workershave substantive consequences for how the open government data and transparency agendas areperformed.Keywords: Open Government Data; Open Standards; Enactment; Infrastructure Studies; DataAssemblages