Fifty Shades of No
The excuses made as to why data cannot be opened are very predictable. An early example of capturing them was made by Chris Gutteridge at Southampton University in his Open Data Excuse Bingo (broken link removed). More recently, Paul Suijkerbuijk and Ton Zijlstra of The Green Land have developed their Fifty Shades of No - except it's currently at 56 shades and growing.
If Paul and Ton put a version of this on their own site I'd much rather link to that than repeat their work here but I need to be able to refer to it now and in future. Currently the only place I can find the list online is in a presentation (broken link removed) given by Noël van Herreweghe last December at the LAPSI conference (broken link removed).
The point is, of course, that exactly none of these excuses stands up. That's not to say that there aren't issues that need to be addressed. Privacy is top of that list and any activity carried out on the public purse needs to be justified but the excuses here are all synonyms for "I don't want to do it." And that's the real problem.
Opening data, or rather, sharing data openly, offers enormous potential in efficency savings for everyone as well as the development of new, innovative and revenue-generating uses of the data. So enough of the excuses … you just don't want to do it, do you?
- Too expensive
- There’s no business case
- There’s no commercial value
- It’s private
- It’s secret
- It's our data
- We have invested a lot of money in this
- Link enough data and one will arrive at sensitive private information
- It's not data, it's information
- It will never work
- We don't know how to do this
- We don't have the right people to do this
- We need the money
- It’s not ours, and we don’t know who’s data it is
- No idea what the quality of the data is
- We don’t know where to find it
- It’s not our job
- It isn’t in the right format
- I am not authorised
- Who is going to use this anyway
- People are going to misuse it
- Image damage for the minister
- We are not ready for this
- Image loss for Government
- The data file is too big
- Not enough bandwidth
- This is a first step, we will see what we can do later
- We can’t find it
- We have no access
- It is out of date / too old
- We have it only on paper
- We don’t know if it’s legal
- Management says no
- We never did this before
- No value in it
- No time / no resources
- We will open up (but adapt 90%)
- It’s incorrect
- Commercially sensitive
- It is dangerous when linked
- People are going to make the wrong conclusions
- This is going to start a wrong discussion
- We can’t say whether we have it or we don’t
- We know the data is wrong, and people will tell us where it is wrong, then we'd waste resources inputting the corrections people send us
- Our IT suppliers will charge us a fortune to do an ad hoc data extract
- We have to be careful whit existing contracts
- Our website cannot hold files this large
- It's not ours and we don't have authorization from the data owner
- We've already published the data (but it's unfindable/unusable)
- People may download and cache the data and it will be out of date when they reuse it
- We don't collect it regularly
- Too many people will want to download it, which will cause our servers to fail
- People would get upset
- It’s very sensitive information
- We are not ready for this
- Tell us who is going to use it and we will make it open