Open Data Is Not Open Government: Clarifying the Digital Service Act, 2025

Originally posted on LinkedIn on Mar 3, 2026 — republished here with minor edits

In a previous article, Observant Data examined the concept of open data as defined under Botswana’s Digital Service Act, 2025. The Act adopts a broad definition, describing open data as information made available by public or private entities without restrictions on use.

This signals a strong governmental commitment to transparency within the digital and innovation ecosystem. However, the breadth of this definition raises important interpretive considerations. Because the framework is government-driven, ambiguity in its wording may create uncertainty regarding its intended scope — particularly when distinguishing between technical data openness and political transparency.

The legislation mandates the Digital Services Authority to design policies and infrastructure for publishing public sector data, subject to appropriate privacy safeguards. It also sets baseline technical requirements that must be satisfied for a technology stack to qualify as “open”. For clarity, this article refers to this framework as Open (Government Data) — that is, data collected by government bodies and made available to the public for use under defined standards.

This should not be conflated with (Open Government) data, where data is made available by an Open Government, a political doctrine grounded in the principle that citizens have the right to access government documents and proceedings to ensure effective public oversight. Open Government is primarily accountability-driven.

The risk of confusing these concepts is not new. In The New Ambiguity of Open Government, published in the UCLA Law Review, Harlan Yu and David Robinson observe that the term “open government” has increasingly been used to describe both

1. The release of machine-readable government datasets to improve innovation and service delivery, in our case : Open (Government data) and
2. The disclosure of information necessary for democratic accountability - (Open Government) Data

They argue that while governments may comply with open data standards by publishing datasets - such as transportation data, procurement records, or regulatory statistics - such disclosures do not necessarily enhance public oversight or constrain government power. In other words, technological openness does not automatically translate into political accountability.

This scholarly distinction is instructive. It demonstrates that the ambiguity between open data as a technical infrastructure project and open government as an accountability framework has surfaced in other jurisdictions and policy debates.

Accordingly, the enactment of the Digital Service Act, 2025 should not be interpreted as a commitment by the government of Botswana to implement an Open Government doctrine in the political sense. Rather, it establishes a structured regime for the publication, standardization, and reuse of government-held data.

Clear conceptual separation between these two ideas is essential to avoid overstating the accountability implications of what is, at its core, a digital governance and data management reform.