Abstract
The member states of the European Union are faced with the challenges of handling “big data” as well as with a growing impact of the supranational level. Given that the success of efforts at European level strongly depends on corresponding national and local activities, i.e., the quality of implementation and the degree of consistency, this chapter centers upon the coherence of European strategies and national implementations concerning the reuse of public sector information. Taking the City of Vienna’s open data activities as an illustrative example, we seek an answer to the question whether and to what extent developments at European level and other factors have an effect on local efforts towards open data. We find that the European Commission’s ambitions are driven by a strong economic argumentation, while the efforts of the City of Vienna have only very little to do with the European orientation and are rather dominated by lifestyle and administrative reform arguments. Hence, we observe a decoupling of supranational strategies and national implementation activities. The very reluctant attitude at Austrian federal level might be one reason for this, nationally induced barriers—such as the administrative culture—might be another. In order to enhance the correspondence between the strategies of the supranational level and those of the implementers at national and regional levels, the strengthening of soft law measures could be promising.
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- 1.
European Commission 2011d, p. 1.
- 2.
Public sector information is defined as “publicly funded information produced or collected by the public sector” (European Commission 2011b, p. 9).
- 3.
Overall, six people were interviewed. Our interview guidelines drew on interesting aspects from the literature analysis but also emerging topics and local organizational specifics were considered. The interview partners came from different organizations: City of Vienna: CIO; Federal Chancellery: manager responsible for open data in the e-government department; Austrian subsidiary of a large ICT company: business developer; OPEN3 Association: board member; app programmers: two interviews. Each interview lasted between 30 min and 2 h and was tape-recorded when the interviewee agreed to this.
- 4.
http://www.epsiplatform.eu, last accessed: August 12, 2013.
- 5.
http://open-data.europa.eu/en/data, last accessed: August 12, 2013.
- 6.
http://epsiplatform.eu/content/european-psi-scoreboard, last accessed: August 12, 2013.
- 7.
Based on a keyword search in the 2011 NRPs of the EU-27.
- 8.
Interviewee 2: manager responsible for open data in the e-government department in the Federal Chancellery.
- 9.
Interviewee 2: manager responsible for open data in the e-government department in the Federal Chancellery.
- 10.
In Austria, the term “PSI” is strongly connected with the PSI Directive, while “open data” or “open-government data” refer to national developments and are commonly used (Donau-Universität Krems 2012).
- 11.
All figures are as of August 12, 2013 and were taken from data.gv.at.
- 12.
Interviewee 2: manager responsible for open data in the e-government department in the Federal Chancellery.
- 13.
Interviewee 2: manager responsible for open data in the e-government department in the Federal Chancellery.
- 14.
Interviewee 4: OPEN3 Association: board member.
- 15.
Interviewee 1: CIO of the City of Vienna.
- 16.
However, when a closer look at the open government strategy is taken, it has to be remarked that while the first stage is described in detail, the steps 2-4 are documented to a far less comprehensive extent.
- 17.
Interviewee 1: CIO of the City of Vienna.
- 18.
http://data.wien.gv.at/katalog, last accessed: August 12, 2013.
- 19.
Interviewee 1: CIO of the City of Vienna.
- 20.
http://data.wien.gv.at/apps, last accessed: August 12,, 2013.
- 21.
http://data.wien.gv.at/aufnahme-datenkatalog.html, last accessed: August 12, 2013.
- 22.
http://data.wien.gv.at/veranstaltungen, last accessed: August 12, 2013.
- 23.
We acknowledge that the international academic debate is already one step further and centers—with hindsight to the dysfunctions and shortcomings of some of the NPM reforms—on the question of “what’s next” in the post-NPM era of public governance (Christensen and Lægreid 2011; Dunleavy et al. 2006; Lapsley 2009). Yet, in the public management reform discussion in Austria, NPM arguments are often still used.
- 24.
Interviewee 3: business developer in the Austrian subsidiary of a large ICT company.
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Egger-Peitler, I., Polzer, T. (2014). Open Data: European Ambitions and Local Efforts. Experiences from Austria. In: Gascó-Hernández, M. (eds) Open Government. Public Administration and Information Technology, vol 4. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9563-5_9
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