more  concrete  over  time  is  damage  control.  In  a  world  that  produces  digital  data  without 
interruption, uncontrolled and unpredictable data releases are facts of life that are very hard to  
predict, practically impossible to avoid and increasingly common. Opening public government data,  
that is providing plenty of officially verified information, becomes therefore also a damage control  
solution, to prevent or at least minimize damages from such uncontrolled releases. Without official  
Open Public Data, individual citizens, political parties or other organizations will start to process  
and compare (if they already aren't...) data from unofficial sources anyway, maybe from different  
countries. In such cases, it will be unavoidable not reach sometimes, even in good faith, wrong  
conclusions. This is not some theoretical possibility far in the future, as this real world example  
(from a comment to an Open Data discussion in an italian blog) proves: 
"on the [non italian] Geonames website you can download geo-referenced data 
about... 47000 Italian municipalities. That worries me, because there are only 8094 of 
them. Besides, I grabbed a few random data about population, and I can guarantee you 
that not one was right. What should be done in such cases? 
From an Open Data perspective, all these recent stories have (at least) one thing in common: they  
suggest that, considering its current needs and problems, current societies want and need more Open 
Data than they already have. 
2.1. Wikileaks and the Open Data movement
During the 2010/2011 winter the discussions around the Cablegate and other documents published  
by Wikileaks have, in some occasion, included hostility towards Open Data. This is a consequence  
of a more or less conscious mixing of the two themes, because in a very general sense, both Open  
Data and Wikileaks are about transparency, accountability and democracy. 
As far as this study is concerned, two conclusions can be drawn from the Cablegate/Wikileaks  
scandal. 
The  first  is  that,  in  practice,  it  is  necessary  to  find  and  equilibrium  between  secrecy  and 
transparency whenever government activities are concerned. Citizens must be able to know what  
the state is  actually doing but sometimes, be it for careful evaluation of all the alternatives or  
because of security, it must be possible to work behind closed doors,  at least temporarily . We'll  
come back to this point later in this report. 
The second conclusion is that, while certainly both Open Data and Wikileaks are about openness  
and transparency in politics, not only there are deep differences between the two ideas but, in our  
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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/)