Beyond Open Data Introduction
The world we live in has been shaped by open data. For decades, governments, researchers, nonprofits, and companies have used the Internet to share data to unlock new science, enable civic transparency, and build infrastructure that industries now depend on. We know that great things can happen when data is shared, but openness has come to be treated as a binary checkbox: choose an open license, publish a URL, call it done. In an era of AI agents consuming data at scale and exponential data growth, that bar is no longer sufficient.
Last year, the first-ever Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum convened in Snowbird, Utah. One track, Building Resilient Data Ecosystems, was designed differently: no recordings, held under the Chatham House rule, participants speaking as themselves rather than as representatives of their organizations.
“Beyond Open Data" was one of the sessions in the Building Resilient Data Ecosystems track. This session presented hard questions about what open data actually means, what it fails to capture, and what goals we should be orienting toward instead. The result is a white paper that covers these three theses:
(1) Usefulness is a better measure of quality than openness
A dataset can be technically open and still be nearly impossible to use. The group developed a rubric for evaluating data on a spectrum of usefulness – not just a spectrum of openness.
(2) We shouldn’t treat open data just like it is open software
The conflation of open source software with open data has caused real, concrete harm. Open data and open source software have different legal frameworks, different economics, and different sustainability models. The mistakes that come from treating them as equivalent have quietly shaped bad policy and broken funding structures across the geospatial community.
(3) The power of open data comes from a strong ecosystem, not its license
The value of data is a function of how it supports relationships between software, people, and real-world impact. Like any ecosystem, it only functions when the parts are actually working together.
What comes next
This post is the first in a four-part series. Over the coming weeks, CNG will publish a dedicated post for each of the three theses — going deeper on the arguments, the evidence, and the implications for anyone building, publishing, or depending on open geospatial data.
The full white paper is available now. Read it, share it, and give your perspective.
Join the conversation at CNG Forum 2026
The session that sparked this paper happened because CNG created a space for conversations like this. CNG Forum 2026 returns to Snowbird, Utah, on October 6–9, 2026, with the same Building Resilient Data Ecosystems track where this work began. If these types of discussions matter to you, join us for the next in-person conversation at CNG 2026.
Register at 2026.cloudnativegeo.org →
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