 Hi, thank you very much for having this opportunity to present a part of my PhD research here. It's still work in progress, so I would be very grateful for any feedback to improve my work. So this question is one of the central questions of my PhD research, and it might sound trivial, but for me it's very puzzling because open data research is quite young, quite novel. But I think if we look at the quick pace at which government have adopted open data initiative and published open data from a perspective of political science, then this quick pace is quite puzzling because we do have a lot of evidence and there's a lot, there's a quite long tradition in research in government transparency or information exchange within the government. And from what we know, we know that the governments they actually don't like to share information that much, they don't like to share it that much with citizens, they don't like to share it with journalists, but sometimes surprisingly maybe to some, maybe not to others, they don't like to share it also with fellow government agencies, right? And so for me this was very puzzling. So how come we know that the government, they resist transparency by default, right? And they still adopt these open data programs at quite rapid pace worldwide. So this is just one example, I mean I don't have to go through all of them, but this is what the New York Times journalist got in response to their freedom of information request addressed to FBI, I think it was in 2010, so it was exactly in that time when the open government and data agenda was kind of a top priority. And what you can see also on the left, that's what they got, so not much. And on the right what you can see is what they finally got when they sued FBI and the court concluded that this information had been withheld from them unlawfully, so they ordered FBI to release this much information. So this is just to illustrate that we do have, I mean this is just anecdotal evidence, but we do have a lot of research that suggests that government resists transparency, right? And yet they do endorse open data policies, they build open data portals worldwide, these are on national and local level, that's why there are so many. And they commit to increase transparency, to increase access to government data and information, even more. Here we can see this is from the open government partnership, national election plans, and sixth of all the commitments is open data related. So that's quite a lot if we think like how broad open government agenda is. So based on literature in democratic theory and political competition and policy convergence and innovation, I formulated this hypothesis and I assume that governments might adopt open data policies and might publish open data with these very genuine interests that they really do want to improve democracy, that they believe that by increasing access to government information that they would just widen possibilities for citizens to participate. But I argue that if this is the case then what we would observe would be that they would also make sure that there are other more robust information policies in place like freedom of information that they would make sure that they would create environment where media could operate freely and in pluralistic environment. They would also take measures to have independent judiciary, to have independent prosecutors, and they would also have measures to support civil society. So based on this hypothesis what I would expect that the open data availability would be higher in countries that kind of meet all these conditions and that would be the case that they actually follow this goal. Then there might be other case, I mean there might work simultaneously, but the other case might be that they just don't care that much about all democratic stuff, they don't care that much about improving democracy, but they might just want to create new services, they might just want to foster innovation and economic growth, and there's another one which I won't go into details here, I don't test it here, but I think they might also use it to win elections, mostly they might use it in electoral campaigns if the incumbents had some big corruption scandal, so they want to distinguish themselves from them, so that would be on the top of their agenda, or also then if incumbents think that they might not be able to win elections, that they would push for this agenda to secure access to government information in case of electoral laws. And the last hypothesis I propose is that the government might just want to confirm that they just follow the crowd in a way that it's on the top of the agenda, it's kind of promoted by many important international actors, so it's good for reputation to be part of it. So as I said I tested three of these hypotheses, and probably I should tell you a bit about the measures, so here as a measure of state of political rights and civil liberties, I used a Freedom House score, then I used also some measures of judicial accountability and how difficult or easy it is to establish a civil society organization in a country, these are the measures by the varieties of democracy, and I'm thinking what else I included. Yeah, and I also looked whether the country has freedom of information legislation or not, and then the economic growth was measured as a GDP per capita, and then I also looked at how innovative, what's the potential to innovate in a country based on how many days you need to register and establish business in a country. And the last hypothesis where I looked at the case of policy convergence, so I looked mostly how all these influential international players have on open data availability in different countries like worldwide, I did this cross-country comparison, and so I looked whether a country is a member of OECD or not, whether it's a member of Open Government Partnership or Commonwealth, and I also looked at whether a country has a chapter of open knowledge international, or whether they have a chapter of transparency international, as I believe that this might have quite a significant effect on open data availability in these countries. And before I get to the results, I probably, well, if someone asked me what would I need for this research, for me that would definitely be a very good stable and rigorous measure of open data availability, because we do have quite many, we do have, I mean, these are probably those that are most well known. So we have four here. The first one is on the right corner, that's Open Data Inventory by Open Data Watch. I observed that the definition of open data is a bit more legs than for open knowledge, open data index, and Worldwide Web Foundation Open Data Barometer, so I excluded that one, and there is on the right, down right corner, there, you can see that's OECD, our data index, that might be problematic for cross-country comparison as it covers only a small number of countries. So I'm mostly working with Open Data Barometer and Open Data Index. However, these two, they also have their good sides and bad sides. And so, for instance, this is Open Data Barometer. And it started in 2013, so we already have data for four years. And in 2013, we can see, well, there's a problem with representativeness, because the coverage, if you look, well, in Africa, it's kind of like white spot there. There are not many countries that had been assessed in 2013. And then there's no country represented from Central and Eastern Europe. And although this has improved quite significantly, still, there are many countries that are just not assessed in Open Data Barometer. With Open Data Index, there's a problem with comparability. They do change their methodology quite, they have changed their methodology quite significantly last year. And also, during these four years, we have data for, there have been slight changes every year. So it's very hard to compare the data from year to year. And it translates into different scores that are difficult, that you need to know the methodology quite well to understand, like, why one country jumped up or went really down. So, for instance, for UK, for election data sets, at the beginning, it wasn't necessary to have the data at the polling station level. Now it is. And I mean, the change for UK was huge. And there are many, well, not many, but there are few problems like this. And it's very difficult to use these data in a comparison over years. So, yeah, so if I wish something that would be not four, not six, not seven Open Data Indexes, but maybe one that would be really robust, stable and, yeah, we could use it. So, two results. So I know this is awful regression table. I know that's not very useful. But just to give you an idea, I do have some graphs there as well for you to see it better visually. But if we, well, each of these hypotheses, we can find support for each of them to some extent. So, for instance, if we look at the Open Data Availability measured as Open Data Barometer, so what affected that significantly was freedom, the state of political rights and civil liberties. Also, that's actually common also with Open Data Availability measured as Open Data Index. And it is also GDP per capita. And then for Open Data Availability measured as Open Data Barometers, it's also membership in OGP and OECD. And for Open Data Index, it's membership in Open Knowledge International. So, what does it tell us? So, indeed, countries that are freer do have higher Open Data Availability. So the freer the country is the higher Open Data Availability. The richer the country is, the higher Open Data Availability. And the effects, for instance, for the membership in OGP and OECD were quite big. So, being a member of OGP or OECD, all these countries have significantly higher Open Data Availability. And as I said, so you can see that, well, the number of observation, it's only 110 and 120. 20, I can't read that. It's small, sorry for that. So, yeah, it would be great if we had a measure of Open Data Availability that would have greater geographical coverage. And just to show it visually, so it looks nicer and maybe more comprehensive. Sorry. So, this is just the data for Open Data Availability measured as a sub-score of Open Data Barometers, only on the dataset availability. And you can clearly see that the relationship between freedoms, between the state of civil liberties and Open Data Availability, the freer the country, the greater Open Data Availability. So, it has effect. Also, if you look at the freedom of information, so for the countries that have freedom of information, you can see it as the best performance in Open Data Availability. We do have some outliers. And the size of the points suggest how rich the country is, so how big is the GDP per capita. And you can clearly see, again, that, as I said, there are some outliers, but the trend is that the richer the country, the better the greater Open Data Availability. And that's also for members of OGP, which here they're represented by a triangle. So, you can see that countries that are members of OGP do better in Open Data than non-members. And this is pretty much the same, I mean, what you see is pretty much the same, just differently visualized. So, again, here you have a relationship between economic growth and Open Data Availability. And again, you can clearly see that the richer country, the better Open Data Availability. And what I think is important to look also at these outliers. And so here what you can see on this figure is actual scores for Open Data Availability measured by Open Data Barometer. And you can see what would be the predicted score. And you can clearly see that there are some outliers, for instance, Brazil, Mexico, Rwanda, and also UK are doing much better than predicted. And the outlier on the other end is Sierra Leone, which is doing much worse than predicted. And I think it's very important to ask questions. What does it mean to have this good Open Data Availability in Rwanda, for example, where the internet penetration is clearly low? It's probably like 40, 50 percent. So what goals is government following by opening data set? Is it just to innovate, to bring new services? Do they also along the way strengthen some civil liberties? And also I think it's important to ask what sort of implications, for instance, mimicking Open Data portals and policies have. So for instance, maybe there's one example I can use to conclude. And it's Moldova. So Moldova is OGP member, which jumped very up in the score of Open Data Barometer. And you would think that's good. So maybe the fact that they are joining all these international platforms, that's a good thing, right? But then there has been evidence by Israeli political scientists who looked into detail what's going on there. And what they found out that there's no action whatsoever during the year on the Open Data portals. And what they did was publish these data sets just a few days before the visit of World Bank. So I think we need to ask this question, what does it mean? What implications this mimicking of Open Data portals just kind of copy pasting solutions from one country to other mean? And also I think the important question is like, what problems do governments want to solve with publishing data sets? And yeah, that's probably with what I would like to conclude. Thank you.