Page 41 - Proceedings of the 2017 ITU Kaleidoscope

Challenges for a data-driven society

freedom in this group, it is possible to see a slight correlation
with the ODB rank. The exception is Russia, which ranks
well, despite having low levels of freedom and transparency.
The level of freedom among these countries is quite diverse
since there are different kinds of governments found in this
group. Countries with low freedom scores are China,
Belarus, Thailand, Jordan, Kazakhstan, and Russia, where
Russia ranks better in the ODB than the others.

Fig. 7. Relationship between the ODB rank 2016 from1(best)
to 115 (worse) with level of Freedom Free (F), Partial Free
(PF), No Free (NF).

3.2. Global open data trends

For the analysis on the trends of open data, only the original
77 countries included in all editions of the ODB were
considered. Here the focus is on the changes from 2013 to
Fig. 6. Relationship between current ODB rank from 1 (best) 2016 in the ODB rank as well as, in the readiness,
to 115 (worse) with level of freedom from 1 to 100 (very free), implementation, impact and the relationships scores.
level of transparency from 1 to 100 (very transparent), and
ICT development rank 1 (best) to 115 - (top); relationship
between freedom from 1 to 100 (very free) with level of
transparency from 1 to 100 (very transparent) - (bottom).
Countries grouped by level of GNI.

Democracies rank comparatively good in the ODB.
Venezuela is a special case scoring badly in both
transparency and freedom, which is a reflection of the current
political crisis in the country. Other countries such as
Ecuador, Paraguay, Mexico and Colombia are democracies
scoring as free countries, but they have problems with
transparency. Expect for Mexico these countries rank middle
in the ODB. The case of Mexico with a good ODB rank
could be read as if the country were investing in open data to
improve its transparency.
Lower middle-income countries are doing similar to upper
middle-income ones. They are also relative worse than the
upper middle-income countries in both transparency and
freedom. However, there is a wide variation in the freedom Fig. 8. Changes in the ODB rank, impact, implementation,
status among the countries. For instance, India and Tunisia readiness scores from 2013 to 2016 averaged per region.
are free, but Yemen and Vietnam are considered not free. Positive values reflect an improvement of the rank, negative a
th
st
This group of countries is also ranking low in the ICT decline. (top); ODB 1 ed. rank 2013 and ODB 4 ed. rank
2016 regional averages (bottom).
development index, yet it is possible to observe that similar
to the other income groups, the level of freedom is related to
the level of ODB. From Figure 8 it is possible to observe that East Asia &
Countries in the low-income group are similar in terms of Pacific and Latin America & Caribbean had a big
freedom and transparency ranking similarly to the lower improvement in readiness and implementation especially in
middle-income countries. Regarding the ICT development, comparison to Europe. East Asia & Pacific is the one region
these countries are far behind, scoring the worst in the IDI with the biggest improvement in the impact, although having
index. This low ICT development is really influencing the lower improvement in implementation than Latin America &
ODB rank of these countries since they have limitations in Caribbean. Europe & Central Asia had no changes regarding
the use of data. readiness, and it has gone down in the ODB rank. One reason
for this could be that the region started already with a high-
level of readiness for first ODB rank in 2013.

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