The first municipal open data portal in the country went live in 2015 with 41 datasets and a launch event. It now holds 2,847. Nobody involved can tell you, with any confidence, how many of them have ever been used for anything.
This is not a scandal. It is something more ordinary and harder to fix: a decade of institutional effort aimed at a goal that was never operationalised.
What “open” came to mean
The original commitment was specific: publish machine-readable data, under an open licence, without registration. By that standard the programme succeeded almost completely. Roughly 94 percent of the catalogue meets all three conditions.
The trouble is that those three conditions describe a publishing practice, not a usability one. A CSV with undocumented column headers, no update schedule, and no contact address satisfies every letter of the commitment and is nearly useless to anyone outside the department that produced it.
Published, but not documented
Share of the 2,847-dataset catalogue meeting each condition. Publishing rules are met almost everywhere; the conditions that determine whether a dataset can be used are met far less often.
| Condition | Share | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Machine-readable | 94% | Publishing rule |
| Open licence | 91% | Publishing rule |
| No registration required | 88% | Publishing rule |
| Documented columns | 31% | Usability condition |
| Stated update schedule | 22% | Usability condition |
| Named contact | 9% | Usability condition |
Nobody counted the readers
Download counts exist. They are also close to meaningless: a scheduled scraper hitting a file nightly for four years produces 1,460 downloads and zero uses.
What the next decade would need
The programme's own staff are, on this point, considerably more candid than its annual reports. Three of the four data officers interviewed independently named the same first step: stop counting datasets.
“Two thousand eight hundred is not an achievement,” one said. “It is an inventory. An achievement would be forty datasets that somebody outside this building depends on, and knowing which forty.”