The Emergence of a Third Wave of Open Data: How To Accelerate the Re-Use of Data for Public Interest Purposes While Ensuring Data Rights and Community Flourishing

We live, as we are so often told, in an era of data abundance. Yet we also live during a period marked by tremendous inequities and asymmetries when it comes to data access. These contradictory phenomena represent one of the great paradoxes of our times, reflective of more general socio-economic and political trends. Even as ever greater amounts of data are generated and stored, the capability to actually access and re-use this data to spur positive social change remains stunted. This discrepancy occurs despite the success of the open data movement, which built on earlier Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation in pushing at the boundaries of transparency and accessibility. In this piece, we argue these (and many other) limitations necessitate additional improvements to accelerate the re-use of data to unleash the public good potential of the digital era. We reflect on the potential of what we call the “Third Wave of Open Data.” We discuss both what we see as the emerging elements of this wave and the actions several players have taken that may contribute to its realization. In doing so, we propose actions for how policy makers and data practitioners might address the limitations of previous waves and outline a set of actions that could accelerate data re-use and collaboration.