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Abstract: For a successful public value strategy, the elements "public values/strategic goals", authorizing environment" and "operational capability" should be coherently aligned. In this paper, we discuss how we have aligned these elements in the context of Open Data. We focus on the relationships between Open Data and public values, in particular, trust, transparency, privacy and security. Several contradictions exist between these values. To succeed, Open Data policy has to reconcile these values. For reconciliation purposes, we introduce the notion of precommitment, which is a restriction of one's choices. Precommitment is conceptualized as a policy-instrument whereby an organization imposes some restraint on its policy in order to restrict the extent to which values may conflict and stakeholders have to worry about the trustworthiness of that policy. We demonstrate how precommitment - implemented as a data request procedure - combined with a proper data infrastructure for Open Data may reconcile potentially conflicting values.
Keywords: open data, trust, privacy, precommitment, data infrastructure
1. Introduction
Open data (OD) is gaining importance in recent years. This increase of importance is taking place in the context of a growing demand for openness. Governments and governmental organizations plead for more openness, e.g. the Obama Administration and the European Union (Zuiderwijk et al. 2012) (Kulk et al. 2012) (ROB 2012). But also the scientific community is calling for more openness with its own research data. Openness is viewed as a means to contribute to transparency and via transparency, it is assumed to contribute to trust of civilians and other stakeholders amongst the government and in science (Zuiderwijk et al. 2012) (Kulk et al. 2012) (ROB 2012) (Schuyt 2012) (Rajamäki 2012). On the other hand, openness may lead to privacy breaches and security violations (Braak, et al. 2012) (Gutmann et al. 2008) (Kalidien et al. 2010) (Kulk et al. 2012).
In line with the increase of the importance of OD, several OD initiatives are going on at the moment (Conradie and Choenni 2012). These OD initiatives all have in common that they are to a certain extent operating with more or less defined goals and objectives, some of which can be categorized as "public value" (PV). The "open" side of OD provides access for the public eye. This clearly underlines the idea...