A book chapter on “Making Data Public? The Open Data Index as Participatory Device” co-authored with Danny Lämmerhirt has just been published in a new open access book on Good Data. The book is part of the Theory on Demand series of the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, founded by media theorist and activist Geert Lovink. You can find more about the book here. A direct link to the full PDF for the book is here (Institute of Network Cultures) and a PDF of the published version of our chapter may be found here (Zenodo).

The chapter draws on ongoing research around my Data Worlds book, research collaborations and experiments around doing participation with data (including with the Public Data Lab) as well as research, policy and advocacy work at the civil society organisation Open Knowledge International. Here’s the abstract:

The Open Data Index is a ‘civil society audit’ which strives to shape the availability and openness of public sector data from around the world. In this chapter we examine the social life of this project, including how it evolved, the changing visions and practices associated with it, and how it serves to assemble and involve different publics in the assessment of institutional practices and forms of datafication. Drawing on recent work on statactivism, data activism and the performative effects of numbers, rankings and indices, we look at how the index organises participation and data politics in specific ways, raising questions about not only making data public but also the making of public data. It plays two roles which are sometimes in tension: (i) conventionalising assessment to facilitate comparability, and (ii) reflecting the diversity of different interests, issues and settings involved in opening up public sector data. It also facilitates the creation of ‘enumerated entities’ as objects of concern in open data advocacy and policy. The Open Data Index may thus be viewed as a site where participation is both configured and contested, and where practices of valuation and enumeration are both conventionalised and brought into question.

The full reference for our chapter is:

Gray, J., & Lammerhirt, D. (2019). Making Data Public? The Open Data Index as Participatory Device. In A. Daly, S. K. Devitt, & M. Mann (Eds.), Good Data. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

The book is edited by Angela Daly, S. Kate Devitt and Monique Mann, and there are chapters on indigenous data sovereignty, “good enough data”, energy data, data journalism, communal data sharing, data ethics, data activism, accounting for network practices, designing with data and more.