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Abstract
Open data have the potential to improve the governance of universities as public institutions. In addition, open data are likely to increase the quality, efficacy and efficiency of the research and analysis of higher education systems by providing a shared empirical base for critical interrogation and reinterpretation. Drawing on research conducted by the Emerging Impacts of Open Data in Developing Countries project, and using an ecosystems approach, this research paper considers the supply, demand and use of open data as well as the roles of intermediaries in the governance of South African public higher education. It shows that government's higher education database is a closed and isolated data source in the data ecosystem; and that the open data that are made available by government is inaccessible and rarely used. In contrast, government data made available by data intermediaries in the ecosystem are being used by key stakeholders. Intermediaries are found to play several important roles in the ecosystem: (i) they increase the accessibility and utility of data; (ii) they may assume the role of a “keystone species” in a data ecosystem; and (iii) they have the potential to democratize the impacts and use of open data. The article concludes that despite poor data provision by government, the public university governance open data ecosystem has evolved because intermediaries in the ecosystem have reduced the viscosity of government data. Further increasing the fluidity of government open data will improve access and ensure the sustainability of open data supply in the ecosystem.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
François van Schalkwyk is an independent researcher working in the fields of open data, higher education studies and science communication.
Michelle Willmers is a Project Manager and Researcher at the University of Cape Town.
Dr Maurice McNaughton is a Director at the Center of Excellence, Mona School of Business, University of the West Indies.
ORCID
François van Schalkwyk http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1048-0429
Notes
1. In its simplest form, governance is understood to be concerned with the processes of decision-making and implementation (UN ESCAP, n.d.).
2. See Sunday Independent, 29 July 2012, “Poor leadership cripples tertiary institutions.”
3. This need is confirmed by the number of requests received by the Centre for Higher Education Transformation in 2013 from four South African public universities (and three African universities) to present to council (and management) a set of institutional-level indicators. N. Cloete (personal communication, 20 January 2014).
6. Universities are also required to submit finance and research output data but these data are not stored in the HEMIS database. Finance and research data are submitted in the form of annual reports.
7. South Africa was a founding member of the Open Government Partnership launched in 2011.
8. It is worth noting from our findings on the use of higher education data, that higher education researchers do not make use of HEDA. Researchers, some of which are independent or employed by non-governmental organizations, most likely do not have the financial means to subscribe to the HEDA platform.
9. Here, we are only referring to the context in which the data are provided (a website, an online platform, a dashboard, etc. and the content they contain). Equally important, according to Gurstein (Citation2011) is the variable contexts in which the spectrum of open data consumer finds themselves. A point echoed by the political commentator Steven Friedman when commenting on the implementation failures of the South African government's Open Government Partnership action plan – “Democratic government is meant to serve the people. This possibility is restricted when government alone decides the forums in which citizens should talk to it” (Friedman, Citation2013).