Potential of open data in sustainable and open governance: A search for imperceptible barriers

Open data has gained its importance in many aspects of developments including research, education, governance and socio-economical developments. This paper presents a study of the open data movement worldwide and its impact particularly on governance and it’s related areas. The idea of governance is further illustrated to open government and the potential role the open data could play in an open governance model. The key enablers of open government are essentially transparency and accountability. The role of open data is detailed in making open government goals sustainable. That brings up further investigations on the barriers of open data movement and the efforts made by the participant governments worldwide to break those barriers. In this work, it is established that the least focussed barrier is the privacy concerns of open data and very less work have been done by the governments across the globe. However, privacy being a very strong barrier in limiting the movement of data in open data bounds, the analysis presents an argument to consider the need to encourage work that could ease the opening of data.