1. Introduction
This report is the final deliverable of the Open Data, Open Society research project. It follows the  
publication of the Open Data, Open Society report , finished in late October 2010 and published in  
early January 2011. That first report focused on explaining the critical importance of digital data in  
contemporary  society  and  business  activities;  defining  Open  Data;  giving  examples  on  their 
potential, especially at the local level, on transparency and economics activities; finally, defining  
summarizing some general best practices. 
This second report looks at what happened in the Open Data arena after October 2010. After some  
considerations on the general social and political background in late 2010/early 2011, it is divided  
in two main parts. The first describes some emerging trends and issues related to Open Data, that  
got minor or no coverage in the first report. The second part discusses some practices and actions to  
follow to deal with those trends and issues. 
2. Social and political landscape
It is worthwhile to begin by mentioning several events, happened between the end of 2010 and the  
first months of 2011, that can help to understand what will be the place and role of Open Data in the  
future, as well as the challenges faced by its advocates. 
The first two are the Spanish "Indignados" and the Arab Spring. The first movement has among its  
goals "a change in society and an increase in social awareness" . The Arab Spring, as L. Millar put  
it on the  New Zealand Computer Society website ,  "demonstrated the potency of technology to  
reflect citizens' views of government systems that are not transparent."  As a consequence, noted the 
Afrinnovator blog, "we have seen from the civil disobedience in the North of Africa and the Middle  
East, the appetite for more accountable and transparent government will only grow from here on" . 
From this analysis it looks like, in a way, both the Indignados and the participants to the Arab  
Spring are (also) asking for Open Data, even if they aren't using the term and many participants to  
these grassroots movement may still ignore its definition, that was born inside hackers and Public  
Administration circles. 
Two other important events that, in different ways and at different levels, prove the importance of  
Open Data are the Fukushima nuclear accident and the Cablegate, which we'll analyze in the next  
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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/)