Is altruism dead? A critical case study on the paradigm shift in Open Government Data

The broad and continued success of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) has helped to spread its ideology many other domains, including Government Data (OGD), which recently gained prominence due potential for feeding algorithms. Despite the anti-market anti-corporation values around free sharing, citizen participation, unrestricted transparency propagated in particular by a highly idealized academic discourse on OGD, our case study development Switzerland’s national OGD portal suggests that altruistic philanthropic notion is often associated with needs be reconsidered. We show low use, one side, practical necessity towards cost-recovery behaviors, have led compromise ideological beginnings paved way pragmatic shift more utilitarian, partly even protectionist, view liberating sharing data.