Towards operationalizing the communal production and management of public (open) data: a pedestrian network case study: A pedestrian network case study in operationalizing communal open data

Data is an inseparable part of community management. Data openness and transparency has been a driver for change in government accountability and public engagement by providing unprecedented access to information. More prominently, there exists enthusiasm about the possibilities created by new and more extensive sources of data to improve our understanding and management of communities. This work examines a case study in collecting and operationalizing sustainable open data and specifically open government or civic data - information, public or otherwise, which anyone is free to access, analyze and re-use for any purpose - through a platform and community organizing effort in crowdsourcing open pedestrian network data. We outline a number of tensions or challenges in opening data, specifically in a number of realms where public interest stands to benefit from uses of the data, yet no single commercial or governmental entity is either liable or has a clear monetary interest associated with freely opening that data. In these specific cases, collection of these open data becomes a community-based challenge to undertake, which raises a number of additional socio-technical, political, and data provenance considerations. Beyond the technical contributions of our framework (in the open-source tools to support community activities, our case study contributes a number of insights and recommendations regarding community engagement, use of participatory co-design jointly with data collection tools, and planning for sustainable data stewardship in the involved communities.