Decentralisation in public sector data platforms: A pathway to enhancing public value?

Paper by Sara Thabit, Till Degkwitz, Mahardika Fadmastuti and Luca Mora: “Technology decentralisation is increasingly proposed as a key feature to build more trustworthy, accessible, and innovative digital public infrastructure, yet there is limited empirical knowledge of the actual benefits that such decentralised approaches would create from a public sector perspective. Furthermore, existing literature often relies on a linear dichotomy between data supply and demand that fails to capture the complexity of decentralised data ecosystems. This paper addresses these gaps by adopting an assemblage thinking perspective to conceptualise data platforms as complex socio-technical arrangements, and by developing a public values framework to broaden the understanding of the various outcome that data platforms can create. We apply this approach to an exploratory case study of Hamburg’s Urban Data Platform (UDP). Our findings demonstrate that public value creation is not determined by technical decentralisation alone but by specific architecture-governance configurations. We illustrate that both decentral and central practices can co-occur within the same system, where the role of a leading orchestrator is crucial to drive public value creation…(More)”.