Smart Rural: The Open Data Gap

The smart city paradigm has underpinned a great deal of the use and production of open data for the benefit of policy makers and citizens. This paper posits that this further enhances the existing urban rural divide. It investigates the availability and use of rural open data along two parameters: pertaining to rural populations, and to key parts of the rural economy (agriculture, fisheries and forestry). It explores the relationship between key statistics of national / rural economies and rural open data; and the use and users of rural open data where it is available. It finds that although countries with more rural populations are not necessarily earlier in their Open Data Maturity journey, there is still a lack of institutionalisation of open data in rural areas; that there is an apparent gap between the importance of agriculture to a country’s GDP and the amount of agricultural data published openly; and lastly, that the smart city paradigm cannot simply be transferred to the rural setting. It suggests instead the adoption of the emerging ‘smart region’ paradigm as that most likely to support the specific data needs of rural areas.