When a Civil Society Initiative Becomes a Tool to Justify the Government

Abstract

The question of utility of open data and related civil society initiatives depends on whom we consider a beneficiary in each particular case. The article provides a recent example of a civil society initiative that addressed the openness of procurement practices across the nations of European Union and its neighboring partners. Analyzing the project against Open Government Working Group's principles of open data, the article demonstrates that it indeed improved some levels of procurement data openness. Meanwhile, despite some utility of the project for the European Commission, the analysis suggests rather low utility for the public at large. The article suggests that, (1) utility has multiple levels, and some data in an open source is better than none; (2) data has to be understandable to have any utility for final consumers; and otherwise, the only utility achieved is the legitimization of the current governmental practices instead of their improvement