the availability of Open Data. Of course, this isn't always possible. 
3.6.6. Unprepared Public Administrators
It is undeniable that today, especially at the local level, most Public Administrators that should or  
may contribute to open the public data held by their organizations still ignore, and sometimes  
disdain, Open Data proposals, principles and practices. This happens for many reasons. We'll only  
mention two of them that are quite common. They are interesting because, while being somewhat  
related and sharing common origins, one is very hard to fix, the other, at least in comparison, very  
easy. 
To begin with, most of these administrators are people that, albeit very competent and committed to  
their work, were not really trained to live with so much of what they perceive as "their" documents  
and daily activities as Open Data implies regularly exposed to the public. This is true even among  
administrators  who  are  already  well  acquainted  with  mainstream  "Web  2.0"  practices.  Many 
officers who already have a regular presence on Facebook, Twitter or other social networks and  
regularly use those platforms to discuss their work with their constituents feel diffident about Open  
Data in the same measure as their colleagues who don't even use computers yet. A cultural barrier  
like this requires both strong demand from citizens and detailed examples of how Open Data can be  
good for the local budget to be overcome in acceptable time frames. 
Another factor that may keep administrators away from Open Data is the more or less unconscious  
assumption that, in order to use them, a City Major or Region Governor should be very skilled  
himself, if not with actual programming, with "Web 2.0" tools, modern online services and/or  
general software engineering principles. This is simply not true. Surely, Open Data is something  
that is made possible only by modern digital technologies and the Internet, but at the end of the day  
it's  "simply"  a  way  to  increase  transparency,  efficiency  and  cost  reductions  inside  Public 
Administration, and to create local jobs. If these hypotheses are as concrete as this and many other  
studies explain, there is no need for a Major to have programming skills, like social networks or  
have any other personal "2.0" skill or training to see the advantages of Open Data and delegate to  
his or her IT staff their implementation. 
3.7. The privacy problem
Being perceived as a lethal attack to privacy remains one of the biggest misunderstandings that  
prevents adoption of Open Data. On one hand, there is no doubt that in an increasingly digital world 
it becomes harder and harder to protect privacy. But, exactly  because the whole world is going  
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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/)