Towards an Open Data Ecosystem: A Guide for the Province of Río Negro

Abstract

Currently, open data are key to make available large volumes of information for free and with licenses that allow its use and redistribution. The objective of this work is to design a strategy for the adoption of open data to integrate it into an Open Data Portal for the province of Río Negro. This is part of the research project “A Data Governance Framework for the Digital Transformation in the Province of Río Negro” developed at the Applied Informatics Laboratory, Sede Atlántica, Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. Since the approval of the Data Openness Plan (Decree 117/2016) and the Law on Access to Public Information (Law 27,275) at the national level, government agencies began to publish data in order to promote transparency and facilitate citizen access to reusable information. Considering the Data Governance Bill of the Province of Río Negro and the guidelines of the research project “Data Governance for Digital Transformation”, this paper discusses different concepts, methodologies, benefits and challenges, and reviews best practices and lessons learned from international, national and subnational open data initiatives, allowing the development of a guide for the publication of open data for Río Negro. In this context, the role of open data as a key resource and its potential to generate sustainable value by contributing to the larger goal of a citizencentric digital transformation and provincial development will be discussed.