4.3. Keep past and future separate
For the same reason why it is important to always distinguishes between political and economical  
advantages (or disadvantages) of Open Data, it is necessary to keep decisions about  future data  
(those that will arrive in the future, due to new contracts, public services and so on) separate from  
those about data that already exist. At the end of 2010, T. Steinberg  wrote that the idea that  
Government should publish everything non-private it can  now is "rather dangerous", and that it  
would be much better to release nothing until someone actually asked for it, and at that point doing  
it right, that is with an open license and so on. The first reasons for Steinberg's concern is that  
asking for everything as soon as possible would "stress the system too much, by spreading thin the  
finite amount of good will, money and political capital" . The second is that many existing old data  
and data archival systems are, in practice, so uninteresting that it wouldn't make sense to spend  
resources in opening them. 
Even if these concerns were always true, it is important to realize that they apply (especially the  
second) to already existing data, not to future ones. The two classes of data have, or can have, very  
different constraints. Existing data may still exist only in paper format and/or be locked by closed or 
unclear licenses, or not relevant anymore for future decisions. 
Opening  future data, instead, is almost always more important, useful urgent, easier and cheaper  
than digitizing or even only reformatting material that in many cases is already too old to make  
immediate, concrete differences. While this argument is probably not always true when we look at  
Open data for transparency, it probably is when it comes to economic development. 
Therefore,  features  and  guidelines  that  should  be  present  in  all  future  data  generation  and 
management processes include: 
• standardization: the less, obviously open, formats are used for data of the same type, the  
easier it is to merge and correlate them. The formats that have to be standardized are not  
only those at the pure software level. Even more important is, for example, to adopt by law  
standard identificators for government suppliers, names and machine-readable identifiers of  
budget voices and so on 
• preparation for future digitization: new digital systems should explicitly be designed from  
the beginning so that it will be possible, when non-digital records will be digitized, to add  
them to the databases without modifying losses. 
• Open licenses 
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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/)