decisions. Ideally, this training should be provided at a local level with local programs, in a way that 
makes it possible to use it on local issues, for the reasons and in the ways discussed in the next  
paragraph. For example, visualization techniques like those used by ABC News to show the effects  
of the March 2011 Japan Earthquake, in which all the user has to do to compare scenes from before  
and after the earthquake is to move a slider, should be routinely used to explain proposals about  
urban planning, zoning and related topics. 
4.6. Focus on local, specific issues to raise interest for Open 
Data
Considering the continuous evidence and concerns about scarce interest and preparation of citizens  
to  use  Open  Data  in  their  political,  economic  and  professional  decisions,  one  of  the  final 
recommendations of the Open Data, Open Society report confirms its importance and needs to be  
repeated: it is very effective, if not simply necessary if the goal is to generate a critical mass of  
citizens  that  demand  and  use  Open  Data  in  the  shortest  possible  time,  to  practice  all  the 
recommendations of this report at the local level, 
Most people encounter their local governments much more often then their national ones. When  
working within a single city or region it is much easier to inform citizens, raise their interest and  
involve them, because they would be searching  local solutions to improve  local services and/or  
save local money. There may also be much more opportunities to do so, especially in this period of  
financial crisis that will see substantial decreases both in credit by financial institutions and in  
subsidies from central governments. Concreteness and, as they say in marketing, "customer focus"  
must be the keys for local activists and public employees working on local Open Data: 
• work on specific issues and with precise objectives 
• focus on immediate usefulness 
• work on demand, on the services that people want. Required services define what data must  
be open, not the contrary 
This is the most effective, if not the only strategy, to solve one of the biggest debates in open data:  
"how do we get people to use the data that we publish?" . The right question, instead, is "what data  
do people want?". Even if citizens don't realize yet that what they actually want is more Open Data,  
or that what they need can be done more quickly and cheaply by releasing some information in that  
way. 
A great example of what all this means is the Great British Public Toilet Map: a public participation 
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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/)