• better procurement 
The first two features have obvious technical advantages regardless of data openness. The last two,  
being critical, are discussed separately in the next paragraph. 
4.4. Impose proper licensing and streamline procurement
As with the first report prepared for this project, we will not delve into the details of how to license 
data because this topic continues to be followed and debated in all details by LAPSI and other  
projects or researchers. We will simply confirm the importance of establishing a proper license, at  
the national level, for all Public Data, that makes them Open in the right way and makes sure that  
what is opened stays open and that don't demand what isn't possible to enforce (e.g. attribution),  
because, quoting again Eaves, "no government should waste precious resources by paying someone  
to scour the Internet to find websites and apps that don't attribute". 
We want, however, to spend a few words about another legal/administrative side of the issue, that is  
procurement. Traditional procurement laws are very likely not flexible enough, in most countries, to 
handle the implementation of data-based public services. Here's why. 
We know that if Public Data are Open, everybody, from volunteer activists to hired professionals,  
can very quickly write or maintain simple software applications that help to visualize and use them  
in all possible ways. Paradoxically, this is a problem when an Administration either wants to set up  
an Open Data programming contest (that besides being inexpensive, it's much simpler to organize  
and join than traditional tenders or grants) or needs to just pay somebody to write from scratch and  
maintain some new program of this type, or customize existing ones. 
The reason is that, just because this type of software development is so quick, even hiring a  
professional to do it, or setting up a contest would be... too inexpensive to be handled with default  
procurement  procedures.  Quoting  from  Day  Two:  Follow  the  Data,  Iterating  and  the  $1200 
problem: 
A big problem for cities is procuring products under $10,000. How does a city pay for 
an awesome application like SeeClickFix when it doesn't fit the normal year-long 
planning and two-year implementation in the millions of dollars? In Tuscon, Andrew 
Greenhill tapped the Mayor's general budget for it, instead of trying to get the IT 
department to shell out. In San Francisco, Ed Reiskin uses discretionary spending. But 
every time, procurement gets messy. In reference to nepotism laws, Ed worries that he'll 
appear "like I'm giving my buddies dollars." Building great products for cities has to 
include finding great strategies to pay for them. In San Francisco, Jay Nath doesn't even 
have a budget…which, he says is 'liberating' because he doesn't need to go through 
29/34
Copyright  2011 LEM, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. This work is released under a Creative Commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)