 Hello, welcome back. Open government data can also be used in policymaking processes. But how exactly can officials use this data to formulate and improve governmental policies? And how can citizens and other stakeholders contribute to this process? In this video, we will be exploring these issues. After this video, you should be able to describe the current steps of open government data publication and use, describe how this relates to improving public policies, and describe the main roles that are involved. So let's start with the current steps of open government data publication and use. From a high level, the current open data process can be divided into four basic steps. First, the data are created. Government organizations and publicly funded research organizations produce, collect and integrate large amounts of data each day. They collect this data to be able to fulfill their ordinary tests. For instance, the Ministry of Justice collects data about the number of crime victims in order to create its crime prevention policies. The production of this data is funded by public money. Second, public agencies and publicly funded research organizations decide whether they will open their data on the Internet. We often refer to the term data publication when data is opened. Data can be published on the website of a government organization, on a national portal, on other portals, or on different combinations of relevant portals. Governmental data is published on the Internet increasingly and it is then referred to as open data. Third, potential data users can find this data by searching open data portals. This can be done manually, however nowadays this is also often done automatically by machines. For instance, application programming interfaces or APIs can be used for this purpose. And since open government data is provided through a large variety of portals, finding the data that someone is looking for can be challenging. Especially if he or she does not know whether the data exists and which government organization creates or collects the data. Users may be looking for the needle in the haystack. Fourth, when open government data is found this can subsequently be used. Often the data user needs to download the data to be able to work with it. Open government data can be used in many different ways. For instance, by cleansing, analyzing, visualizing, enriching and combining and linking the data. Data cleansing refers to detecting and correcting records in a data set. Data cleansing could be a goal in itself, but is often performed to make it easier to use the data set in another way. For instance, by analyzing it. Analyzing a data set could merely mean reading, that means looking at the data and deriving useful information from this activity. But it could also refer to conducting a thorough statistical analysis by using software such as SPSS statistics. An analysis of a data set could lead to new insights and understanding of the data, possibly by analyzing data in a way that was not done before. Visualizations also often provide much insight in a data set. And data sets can also be enriched in several ways. For instance, a user could annotate the data set by describing his or her experience of using the data or by noting which information other users should take into account when using the data. A data set can also be enriched by adding information that was derived from statistical analysis or the visualization. Another important way of using open data is by combining data with other data sets or by linking them to other data, as this reveals relationships and correlations between data sets. And data interpretation is very important for each of these steps of open data use. For instance, in order to analyze or combine open data sets, the user needs to be able to interpret the data and to understand the context in which it has been created. In sum, we just explored the first four steps of the process of using open data for public policymaking, namely creating data, publishing data, finding data, and using data. After open government data have been used, in practice, the process often stops. Too often, the focus is on publishing, but not on learning from usage, which in turn can result in improvements of the publishing process. If we want to use open government data to formulate and improve public policies, there need to be four more steps. As a fifth step, feedback loop must be generated. Open data users can provide feedback on data sets, such as feedback regarding missing values or data quality problems. Moreover, data users can provide feedback based on the outcomes of the data use. For instance, a researcher can use open government data to answer how taxation affects welfare. This type of data use might help answer research questions and might provide new insights and conclusions. And these insights may be interesting to other open data users, but also to policymakers. Policymakers can analyze this feedback obtained through open data use, discuss it with data users, and subsequently, they can learn from these new insights obtained through open data use. The analysis and discussion of policy feedback might subsequently be used to formulate or improve public policies. And this contributes to creating an open government since the government interacts with citizens and other open data users in its policymaking processes. This means that if governments want to use feedback derived from open data use for improving policymaking processes, they need to publish this data in a way that makes it findable and reusable. Moreover, this requires feedback mechanisms that governments can use to find out how their data has been used and what can be learned from this. This may seem to be simple. However, providing data in a findable and usable format and providing feedback mechanisms in addition to this can be complicated. For instance, governmental organizations may have collected and published data in a format that's not preferred by open data users, which can be a barrier for using the data. Another barrier may be the lack of feedback mechanisms or the complexity of analyzing this feedback by policymakers. The foregoing showed that if governments want to use feedback derived from open data use for improving policymaking processes, actors with a variety of roles are involved. So which main roles are involved? First, we saw that data providers are involved since they supply the governmental data to the public. For instance, these can be international, federal, regional, or municipal government agencies, such as the European Commission, the federal government in the United States, and the municipality of Rio de Janeiro. Moreover, open data users are an important role category. There are different types of users, including entrepreneurs, developers, citizens, but also researchers, journalists, archivists, and librarians. Civil servants themselves can also be users of governmental data, for instance when using data provided by other governmental agencies. Furthermore, policymakers are involved since they can make use of the knowledge obtained through open data use and use this to formulate and improve governmental policies. So these are the three key roles. The actors performing these roles are dependent on each other's activities. For instance, open data users depend on governmental data providers for obtaining the data that they are interested in. Open data providers depend on open data users to obtain feedback regarding data publication that can be used for future data supply. And policymakers depend on the users to obtain information that can be used in development of policies. Managing these interdependencies requires coordination of the activities of open data providers, users, and policymakers. The actors need to collaborate to make policymaking with open data possible. In sum, it can be concluded that open data might be used for policymaking, yet using open data to improve public policymaking is not as straightforward as it may seem and is accompanied by barriers. So here are the references related to this presentation. Thank you for your attention.