Is altruism dead? A critical case study on the paradigm shift in Open Government Data

Abstract

The broad and continued success of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) has helped to spread its ideology to many other domains, including Open Government Data (OGD), which has recently gained prominence due to its potential for feeding algorithms. Despite the anti-market and anti-corporation values around free sharing, citizen participation, and unrestricted transparency propagated in particular by a highly idealized academic discourse on OGD, our case study of the development of Switzerland’s national OGD portal suggests that the altruistic and philanthropic notion that is often associated with OGD needs to be reconsidered. We show that low use, on one side, and the practical necessity towards cost-recovery behaviors, on the other side, have led to a compromise of the altruistic ideological beginnings of OGD and paved the way for a pragmatic shift towards a more utilitarian, partly even protectionist, view on liberating and sharing data.