Open Data: Where Do
Municipalities Draw the Line?
The pros and cons of charging for taxpayer-funded data
By Robert Remington
A
nthony Williams, the former
mayor of Washington, D.C.,
recently put forth an opin-
ion that many sitting politi-
cians are reluctant to express: mon-
etizing municipal data rather than
making it open and free. Advocating
a paywall for government data could
be political suicide for an elected of-
ficial. It would likely never be raised
during a campaign for fear it would
be interpreted as going against the
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democratic principles of
openness, transparency
and accountability.
Yet, in the decade
since the open data
movement first took
root, government infor-
mation has become a
valuable commodity. It
has gone beyond look-
ing up property taxes
and the salaries of civic
Justin Longo
officials to informa-
tion used for real-time
transit and traffic apps
by third-party develop-
ers, complex geospatial
analysis, and hydrology
flows to predict flooding.
On the open data portal
of the City of Edmonton,
ranked by Public Sector
Digest as the most open
city in Canada, it is