China
Feng Gao is an Ambassador for Open Knowledge China, and one of the co-founders of Open Data China, a network to bring different stakeholders into together to advance open data movement in China. Currently living in Shanghai, he is working with Fudan University to build a local partnership to unlock open data values.
China ranked #57 in the 2014 Open Data Index / Other stories from Asia/Pacific
Last year, China was ranked at 34 out of 70 countries in the Global Open Data Index. Many of my friends in the open data community did feel quite surprised about this result, and I personally also think it was over-ranked. This year, China's ranking has already decreased to 50, mainly due to little progress since last year.
China currently has neither set up a national open data portal, nor made any national policies on open data. At city level, however, several cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, QingDao have already started their own experimentation. We currently have a total of six so-called open data portals in China, but in fact none of them has an open license in place to ensure everyone has the legal right to freely use the data.
Given the situation, the Open Data China community believes that the Open Data Index will be a useful tool for us. The Open Data Index breaks down the concept of open data into small criterias, and thus we can use it to show the government what they did right and what they did wrong in a very clear way. The ranking result also is a useful tool to put peer pressure on the government and push it to quickly adopt the open definition, and make some real progress in the next year.
