“Open washing” in Russian Open Government Data
Abstract
The publication of open government data is aimed at improving quality of life by simplifying access to information, but such is not possible for open-washing data, a kind that is falsely declared as open for everyone. Open-washing data cannot be used effectively due to intentional distortion by the data owners. Christian Villum first drew attention to the worldwide persistence of this phenomenon.
Up to today, Russian open government data has not been considered in the context of open-washing, which is critically important now on account of the abolition of the Open Government and other organizations that oversee government openness in Russia.To check if the problem of open-washing is characteristic of Russian open government data, we proposed five quality criteria in this study, intentional noncompliance with which we considered an indicator of open-washing data.
Analyzing Russian legislation for compliance with these criteria, we demonstrated it was imbalanced and incomplete. These shortcomings affected the open data sets published by the federal executive bodies, in that most of them can be classified as sets of open-washing data. As a result, we made recommendations based on suggested automation and data stream centralization to improve the quality of the Russian state’s open data.
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