coal plants. If data are not available, every conclusion is questionable because it relies 
on assumptions or estimates. 
2.3. Open Data in Latin America, Asia and Africa
Several countries in Latin America are studying and making experiments with Open Data both at  
the government and at the grassroots level. The same is happening, on a much smaller scale, in a  
few parts of Asia and Africa. On average, the volume of these Open Data experiments and the level  
of  local interest and awareness around them is still lower than what is happening in Europe and  
North America. In spite of this we suggest that it is important, for public officials and civic activists  
in Western Countries, to follow these developments closely. The reason is that they may turn into  
very useful test beds for all the strengths and limits of Open Data, especially those not encountered  
yet where the movement was born. 
In fact, the original discourse and arguments around Open Data are heavily Western centric. The  
problem they want to solve is how to make democracy work better in countries where it already  
exists and which share a great amount of history and cultural/philosophical values. 
Other countries face very different challenges, from the philosophical level to the practical one. A  
common issue in developing countries, for example, is that there is very little to open simply  
because much PSI (Public Sector Information) doesn't exist in digital format yet. Therefore, the first  
thing to do is to create data, normally through outsourcing and crowd sourcing. 
Other issues, that will be discussed in detail in other sections of the report because they are also  
present in Europe in different forms, are related to lack of equal opportunities for access to data and  
serious fears (sometimes, concrete, sometimes caused by confusion about what should be open and  
how) that data will be used against citizens. A commenter to Gurstein's Open Data: Empowering  
the Empowered or Effective Data Use for Everyone? said: 
in Delhi and Mumbai, mobs and rioters managed to get information about particular 
identity groups through voter rolls: openness is, in certain situations, a precarious 
virtue. It is almost certain that Open Data would be used to rig election but here again 
openness is not the issue, they would find it anyway... 
So far, the main interest about Open Data in Asian countries seems limited, so to speak, to its  
effects on transparency in politics. At a two-weeks programming contest held at the end of 2010 in  
Thailand, for example, one of the most appreciated entries was a software scraper of the Thailand's  
Member  of  House  of  Representative  Website,  that  made  it  possible  for  everybody to  create 
applications using those data. 
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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/)