Talking about the economic benefit of open data is one good way to describe open data’s impact, and provides a "great rationale" for the release of relevant data sets. However, open data’s impact does not lie solely in the economic sphere. Government openness may produce tremendous other benefits for our societies: increasing state or institutional responsiveness, reducing levels of corruption and clientelism, building new democratic spaces for citizens, empowering local and disadvantaged voices, or enhancing service delivery and effective service utilization.
But how effective open data and government transparency actually are at producing these social benefits is not yet at all evident. At a time when "fake government openness" and "open-washing" are increasingly seen as a risk to the transparency movement’s credibility, there is burning need for more evidence on how opening up government information helps us all use resources more “effectively, equitably and sustainably to meet people’s needs.” Developing indexes and comparative studies on a wide range of topics (e.g. budgets, thefreedom of the web, aid, perceived corruption, etc.) is a crucial first step, but in order to get more buy-in from our policy-makers and a critical mass of citizens, we need to look beyond those indexes and find other ways to analyze the effect of open data on societies.
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