Open data is one of the most hopeful and most disappointing movements I’ve been part of, and its politics cut to the heart of what APIs are for. Open data is the commitment — by governments, institutions, and organizations — to make data publicly accessible, ideally through APIs that let anyone build on it. The premise is profoundly democratic: public data is a public asset, paid for by the public, and the public has a right to access it, use it, and build on it. APIs are the mechanism that makes open data real, turning a static dataset into a living resource that developers, journalists, researchers, and citizens can actually use. I spent years deeply invested in the open data movement, especially in government, and the arc of that experience — from soaring early optimism to a more sober reckoning with what was and wasn’t achieved — is one of the defining political stories of the API age.
The early open data era was genuinely exciting, and I was an enthusiastic participant. Data.gov, the Obama open government directive, the push to get every city, county, and state to open their data through APIs — this was a moment when it really seemed like APIs would make government more transparent, more accountable, and more useful to the people it served. I walked through Data.gov, did grassroots evangelism to build awareness, and championed the idea that opening public data through APIs was a democratic good. The political vision was clear and compelling: public data belongs to the public, openness enables accountability and innovation, and APIs are how you deliver on that. For a period, the open data movement had real momentum, real institutional backing, and real idealism behind it, and I believed deeply in its promise.
But the deeper political insight I developed is that opening data isn’t enough — it has to be accessible, usable, and sustained. I wrote in 2011 that opening up information is not enough; it needs to be accessible. Dumping a dataset onto a portal isn’t open data in any meaningful sense if nobody can actually use it — if it’s in an obscure format, undocumented, not available through an API, or not maintained. The politics of open data is partly about this gap between the gesture of openness and the reality of accessibility. A government can claim to be open by publishing data while making that data practically unusable, which is openness as theater rather than substance. Real open data requires the ongoing work of making data genuinely accessible through well-designed, well-documented, maintained APIs — and that work is exactly what often doesn’t get funded or sustained after the initial open data announcement.
The public-lands analogy is how I came to understand the deeper politics of public data, and it’s the framing I’m proudest of. I wrote in 2017 about using public lands as an analogy when talking about public data APIs — because public data, like public land, is a shared resource held in common, and the lesson of public lands is that you can allow renewable extraction as long as it’s managed and the value flows back to the public rather than being privatized. The Google Maps story is the cautionary tale: cash-strapped public agencies generate enormous public value through their data, commercial entities build on it, and the value flows to the companies while the public gets little back. This is enclosure of the data commons in real time. The political question of open data is fundamentally about who captures the value of public data — whether it remains a genuine public good or becomes raw material extracted by whoever is positioned to commercialize it. My concerns as a public data steward, which I wrote about in 2017, centered on exactly this: how do you open data for genuine public benefit without simply handing it to commercial extractors?
The privatization risk is the sharpest political edge of open data, and I grew increasingly wary of it. I wrote in 2018 about being cautiously aware of how APIs can be used to feed government privatization — because the same open data and API infrastructure that can democratize access can also be the mechanism through which public functions and public data get handed to private interests. APIs are politically neutral technology; they can serve the public interest by making government data genuinely accessible, or they can serve privatization by becoming the pipe through which public assets flow to private hands. The open data movement has to be vigilant about this, because the rhetoric of openness and efficiency can mask a transfer of public value to private control. The politics of open data isn’t just about whether data is open — it’s about who benefits from the openness and whether the public’s interest in its own data is genuinely served or quietly undermined.
The honest reckoning is that the open data movement has not delivered what we hoped, and understanding why is itself political. I wrote in 2019 about why the open data movement has not delivered as expected — and the reasons are mostly not technical. Open data initiatives launched with fanfare and then withered from lack of sustained funding, lack of maintenance, lack of genuine institutional commitment, and the gap between publishing data and making it truly usable. Political will faded with administration changes. The hard, unglamorous work of maintaining open data infrastructure didn’t get resourced. And the value, where open data did succeed, often flowed to commercial extractors rather than back to the public. The public data commons that I’ve continued to champion — helping public data drive our economy through APIs while ensuring the value benefits everyone — is my attempt to hold onto the original democratic vision while reckoning with what went wrong. The deepest political truth of open data is that openness is necessary but not sufficient: public data genuinely serving the public requires sustained commitment, real accessibility, protection from pure extraction, and vigilance against privatization. The open data movement proved that the technology to make public data accessible exists and that the democratic case for it is compelling. What it also proved is that openness is a political achievement requiring ongoing struggle and resources, not a one-time gesture — and that the gap between the hopeful rhetoric of open data and its disappointing reality is, fundamentally, a gap of political will and commitment to treating public data as the genuine public good it ought to be.
References
- A Walk Through Data.gov With Some Thoughts On What’s Next
- Opening Up Information Is Not Enough, It Needs To Be Accessible
- Should The Government Subsidize And Profit From Data Markets
- Open Data And API Efforts Rendered Useless When Privacy Is Ignored
- Models For API-Driven Startups Built Around Public Data
- My Concerns As A Public Data Steward
- Using Public Lands As An Analogy When Talking About Public Data APIs
- Cautiously Aware Of How APIs Can Be Used To Feed Government Privatization
- Why The Open Data Movement Has Not Delivered As Expected
- Helping The Public Data Commons Drive Our Economy Using APIs
