In 2016, Brexit also was a failure of Open Data. Will this happen again?
One Brexit fact that really nobody can deny is that, so far, too many decisions and promises have been made… without enough data to back them.

In 2016, two days after the Brexit referendum, I pointed out that one of things that had gone wrong was UK’s failure in a field where they were apparently ahead of most other countries.
I wrote that reactions to the Brexit referendum should be considered also as a wake-up call for the Open Data movement, because:
- “Open Data is something with which we can… understand our governments better”
- [but, in spite of UK behind a leader of this movement..]
- many people had voted Leave or Remain with little or no concrete facts as bases for their decision
That was 2016. Today, almost three years later and with mountains more of data (theoretically) available about all sides of the Brexit coin, UK has just been told that it has up to six months to take hopefully better informed decisions about small matters like:
- who to send to the EU parliament, and to do what
- Brexit itself: do it, change it, abandon it, whatever
What to do with Brexit is for UK citizens to decide. I only want to suggest:
- to UK citizens, to demand and use much more Open Data about EU and Brexit than it happened in 2016
- to all other EU citizens who will vote next month, to do the same, especially when EU-related fake news are involved
- to all Open Data advocates and activists in Europe to forget anything else until May, in order to focus on more Open Data related to EU and EU elections
- LAST BUT NOT LEAST, a related question: please everybody suggest more concepts that every European should know! With EU elections coming, this is more important than ever.
Commenting system (still under test!!!)
You may also:
- Follow my courses on Free Software, Digital Rights and more
- Read my free ebooks and other publications
- Support this and my other works
Project news:
- Calicut: How and Why Open Hardware and Open Source can and should be used in non-western countries
- La Comunificadora is back with some new, challenging projects
- About Marco
Other articles:
- Relational organising is here to help you vote. Yay!
- Time to measure something else in the world
- Palm Oil Factoids of 2019, and its next battle
- NextCloud 16 review
- Geopolitical take-away of the week, from UK, Italy and China
- Four ways to take DNS services in your hand and WHY do it
- Save forests, not tigers or wolves
- What if that shooting guy had been a Thru...