Here's an example of why the two last things are important. In April 2011, during a prime time TV  
talk-show, Italian MP Enrico Letta asked Education Minister Gelmini to justify further cuts to  
Public Schools declared in the new State budget. Gelmini knew nothing about such cuts to the  
budget of her own Ministry, so all she could reply at the moment was that Letta's assertions were  
inconsistent. 
Two days later, two bloggers "proved" that Gelmini was right and Letta's analysis wrong because he 
had cited gross figures instead of net ones and ignored that school budget cuts from 2012 onwards  
were not new at all, but had been already approved in 2008. Right after this debunking, a third blog  
asserted that  everybody was  wrong:  Letta,  Gelmini  and  also  the  first  two  bloggers  who,  for 
unknown reasons, had associated to the Education budget alone all the cuts to the whole public  
sector, and then based all their calculations on a different (and wrong) summary table, not the one  
used (still wrongly, but for other reasons) by Letta. 
As far as we're concerned, the real issue here is not who was right and why, exactly, all the others  
made  certain  mistakes.  The  actual  problem  is:  how  many  of  the  people  who  saw  Gelmini 
unprepared on TV the day this case started also followed up the story in the next days and found out 
that things weren't exactly as they had looked in that talk show, even if Letta had "proved" his case  
with actual, exact "data"? How many citizens are educated to follow the analysis of some data over 
time? 
3.6.5. Lack of public interest
After the October 2010 Government Open Source Conference in Portland, John Moore reported the 
surprise, among participants, that people were not demanding more open data, that the push had  
not yet come from public.  If Open Data is about empowerment, transparency and saving public  
money, why aren't more common citizens already very excited about Open Data? Part of the answer  
is  the  already  mentioned  cynicism  and  lack  of  trust  in  institutions  and  in  the  possibility  for 
individuals to participate effectively to politics and administration. Too many citizens still don't feel  
that it is their right to seek public information from their representatives and administrators, or that  
doing so will make any practical difference. 
Another part of the problem is poor marketing from data activists and Public Administrations, that  
should start to act more like product developers, that is measure the outcome of their activity in  
terms of what has more appeal for the general public. One way to achieve this, especially at the  
local level, may be to highlight (only) the concrete cost savings and local jobs directly created by  
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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/)