procurement. 
The  same  issue  is  denounced  as  an  obstacle  to  innovation  and  cost  savings  in  New 
recommendations for improving local open government and creating online hubs: 
John Grant focused on a major pain point for government at all levels for tapping into 
the innovation economy: procurement issues, which civic entrepreneurs run into in 
cities, statehouses and Washington. "It is time to look at these procurement rules more 
closely," he said, and promote higher levels of innovation. "There are a lot of ideas are 
happening but a lot of rules restrict vendors from interacting in government," said 
Grant. Turner-Lee observed that traditional procurement laws may also not be flexible 
enough to bring more mobile apps into government. 
Current procurement laws aren't partially incompatible with an Open Data world only at this level,  
that is when it's time to procure software that makes the data useful. Even bigger problems and  
inefficiencies can be introduced at the beginning of data life, that is when data collection and  
processing services are procured. We've already explained that forgetting to impose the right license 
is one of the problems, but it's not the only one. Even future organization of all the foreseeable data 
management activities should take advantage of the flexibility provided by data openness. Here is  
how Tim Davies summarizes this point: 
Right now [public] bodies often procure data collection, data publishing and data 
interfaces all in one block (as seems to be the case with Oxfordshires real-time bus 
information - leading to a roadblock on innovation) - and so without these layers being 
separated in procurement, some of the benefits here stand to be lost. 
Changing procurement of information/data-rich public services would be, of course, only the first  
step of a general reform of procurement laws and regulations. After management of Open Data has  
been simplified, it becomes time to implement similar simplifications to procurement of everything  
else. In fact, in such a scenario, there would be much less possibilities for the loopholes, frauds and  
inefficiencies that forced local procurement procedures to become so slow and complicated: since  
the public budget and other relevant public data would already be fully open, errors and other  
problems would surface and be fixed much more quickly and reliably than today, even assuming  
that they would continue to appear with the same frequency. 
4.5. Educate citizens to understand and use data
It is necessary to guarantee the widest possible availability of all the pre-requisites for effective use  
of Open Data. In other words, it is necessary to provide free and widely accessible training, oriented 
to average citizens, on how and why to visualize Public Data and use them to make informed  
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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/)