government. Even ignoring data openness, this is essential for at least three other reasons. The first  
is to protect a public administration from having to pay twice for those data, if it needs it again in  
the future for some other internal activity, not explicitly mentioned in the initial contract. The  
second reason is to not spend more than what is absolutely necessary to respond to public records  
requests, that is to comply with Freedom of Information laws. 
The final reason is to guarantee quality assurance and detection of abuses at the smallest cost, that is 
sharing it with all the citizens using the public services based on those data. A real world example 
of this point comes from the "Where's My Villo?" service in Brussels. Villo! is a city-wide bike-
sharing scheme started in May 2009, through a partnerships with a private company: JCDecaux  
finances  the  infrastructure  and  operates  it,  in  exchange  for  advertising  space  on  the  bikes 
themselves and on billboards at the bike sharing stations. The availability of bikes and parking  
spaces of each station is published online in real time on the official Villo's website. 
When the quality of service decreased, some citizens started "Where's My Villo?", another website  
that reuses those data to measure where and how often there aren't enough available bikes and  
parking spaces, in a way that made it impossible for JCDecaux to deny the problems and stimulated  
it to fix them. Both this happy ending and the fact that it came at almost no cost to the city, because  
citizens could monitor the service by themselves, were possible just because the data from the  
official website were legally and automatically reusable. 
3.4. The price of digitization
In practice, public data can be opened at affordable costs, in a useful and easily usable way, only if  
it is in digital format. As a consequence of this fact, demand for Open Data exposes a problem that  
already existed and must be fixed anyway, regardless (again) of openness. Any substantial increase  
of efficiency and reduction of the costs of Public Administrations can only happen when data and  
procedures are digitized. The problem is that such digitization (which, obviously, must happen  
anyway sooner or later) can be very expensive and we are only now starting to really realize how  
much.  Actual,  material  costs  are  not  the  worst  problem  here.  Activities  like  semi-automatic 
scanning of paper documents or typing again their content inside some database, are relatively low,  
one-time expenses that are also very easy to calculate and budget in advance with great precision. 
The real costs are those at the social, cultural, historical and workflow reorganization level. What is  
really difficult, that is expensive in ways that are hard to predict, is to fit inside digital, more or less  
automatic  procedures  and  file  templates,  formats,  habits  and  customs  developed,  maybe  over 
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Copyright  2011 LEM, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. This work is released under a Creative Commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)