Open Data and the Core Competences of Government: Lessons from Flanders, Belgium

As part of the rhetoric surrounding the Smart City concept, cities are increasingly facing challenges related to data (management, governance, processing, storage, publishing etc.). The Smart Flanders program was initiated by the Flemish Government (Belgium) at the start of 2017 to research and support cities in this field. The goal of the program is to support the 13 so-called center cities in the Region (by and large the biggest cities) and a representation of the Flemish Community in the Brussels Region with defining and implementing a common open data policy. As part of the program, a “maturity check” was performed, evaluating the cities on a number of quantitative and qualitative parameters. This exercise laid to bare a number of challenges in the field of open data and led to a checklist that cities can employ to begin tackling them.