Data Literacy - What is it and how can we make it happen?

The preceding special issue of this journal highlighted the enormous potential of the growing open data movement for social change and sustainable development (Sharif and Van Schalkwyk 2016). Others have emphasised its potential for economic development (Iemma 2012; Stott 2014; Vickery 2011), transparency and accountability (Geiger and von Lucke 2012; Janssen 2011, 2012; Meijer, Curtin, and Hillebrandt 2012), and political engagement (Baack 2015; Meng 2014; Noveck 2009). However, in many respects the movement has so far failed to fulfil its initial promise. Take-up has been disappointing (Peled and Nahon 2015; Worthy 2015), open data portals have not been maintained after promising beginnings (World Wide Web Foundation 2015), and there are increasing concerns about inequality arising from unequal access to data (Davies and Bawa 2012; Gurstein 2011). Key to these problems is the difficulty that the majority of people have in finding, understanding, manipulating and using data. In its early stages the open data movement was driven by the objective of ‘getting the data out there’ in the right technical format; little attention was paid to who would use the data, how they would use it and what support they would need to do so. The key issue was perceived to be overcoming resistance to publishing data; it was widely assumed that once the data was available people would respond as they did to the World Wide Web, creating new forms and concepts in unpredictable but productive ways. In practice this has only happened to a limited extent. The concept of the ‘armchair auditor’, a citizen who browses government