Samenvatting

For a successful public value strategy, the elements “public values/strategic goals”, authorizing environment” and “operational capability” should be coherently aligned. In this paper, we discuss how we have aligned these elements in the context of Open Data. We focus on the relationships between Open Data and public values, in particular, trust, transparency, privacy and security. Several contradictions exist between these values. To succeed, Open Data policy has to reconcile these values. For reconciliation purposes, we introduce the notion of precommitment, which is a restriction of one’s choices. Precommitment is conceptualized as a policy instrument whereby an organization imposes some restraint on its policy in order to restrict the extent to which values may conflict and stakeholders have to worry about the trustworthiness of that policy. We demonstrate how precommitment implemented as a data request procedure combined with a proper data infrastructure for Open Data may reconcile potentially conflicting values.