2015 was about the why of open data. 2016 is about the how.

The open data movement has made a lot of progress in a relatively short amount of time. But it wasn’t all that long ago that the concept of releasing privately held data for unknown people to poke their noses into scared the pants off the owners of that data. And I’m not just talking about government people. I’m talking about the entire internet.

Discovering the value of a more open internet

Today’s “API access by default” world makes it easy to forget the perfectly silo’d version of the internet that was pretty much ubiquitous right up to the end of the last decade. Websites during that time weren’t so much services as they were self-contained universes that had no context within the scope of the other ecosystems available on the internet. The Facebook universe. The Myspace universe. The Youtube universe. All completely isolated on their own desert island servers.

I like to think of that time as the age of warring city-state websites. It didn’t really matter what your web app did. All that mattered was that you were the best, the top ranked site, the one with the most traffic.

Then something crazy happened: A handful of thought leaders started to consider what might happen if, instead of viewing all other websites as competing kingdoms, they instead saw them as fellow nations; nations with different sets of skills and resources that they could, perhaps, trade with.

The shift in ideology has produced the version of the internet we know today. In this new, more civilized age, companies have abandoned the idea that giving up information dilutes their proprietary value. They now understand that sending their data out into the ethos actually strengthens widespread reliance on that data, and solidifies their position in the market. Rather than competing for total control, companies are now specializing in what they’re best at and leaving the rest to everyone else. They work productively together, sharing resources and skills that strengthen the ecosystem and encourage collective success.

This fundamental shift in approach has shaped the landscape of the internet. A decade ago, all of us were users of the internet, but we were not necessarily a community of internet users. Communities were isolated corners of the internet, usually websites, that had to be discovered before they could be joined. Amusingly, I recall a friend’s mom asking me during the earlier days of smart phones whether the internet on my phone was the same internet as the one on her computer.

In 2016, the entire internet itself has become the community. We may not all choose to visit the same websites or use the same services, but we are all citizens of the internet, and we are united by a universal identity. This identity is made possible by the sharing of data across a plethora of specialized services.

Bringing the open data renaissance to government

The type of unity that data sharing brought to the internet has potential for profound civic impact. Unfortunately, government has been slow to adopt it. For the last several years, the major challenge in gov tech has been getting the message of open data to resonate in the public sector. But in a world where self-hosted software and highly regulated processes reign supreme, teaching government data creators the value in sharing the fruits of their labor with the world hasn’t been easy.

It used to be when we pitched people on the idea of releasing data publicly, they would askwhy. My back pocket had to be stocked with colorful open data success stories–particularly ones that involved financial savings–that I would use to illustrate the benefit of joining what the rest of the internet had already embraced, but even with those stories, it was hard to steer conversations away from, “How will losing control over this data hurt me?” and more toward, “How will sharing this data help me?” Nevertheless, in 2015 our efforts have finally begun to pay off.

Years ago, before CityGrows was the product it is today, it was a tiny little tool I built in my spare time to scrape hard-to-find permit data from Los Angeles’s Department of City Planning’s PDF documents and make it easily accessible to the public. I built it because I was extremely frustrated with how difficult it was to keep up with real estate development in my neighborhood, something I felt I had the right to know as a resident. I’m proud to say that in 2015, that old site stopped working. When the error notifications first started rolling in, I was of course, annoyed, but when I started digging to figure out what had gone wrong, I discovered that the PDF documents I was getting the information from no longer existed: They had been replaced by an automated stream of machine-readable data, placed directly on the department’s homepage.

Knowing that someone on the inside had made the decision to put it there, I couldn’t help but smile. My site was dead. But it was a symbolic victory, one that I feel represents the greater shift in thinking away from why and more toward how.

How is the question we’ll be asking in 2016. How do we open data? How do we release it in a way that maximizes its usefulness? Governments are finally seeing the value in open data. Sometimes they’re even excited about it. But that doesn’t mean they know how to act on that excitement. The major challenge from this point onward will be harnessing the momentum of this movement we’ve kindled by providing data-owners with the knowledge and tools they need to provide productive open data. That is our challenge in 2016: to not just make the data available, but to ensure that it’s done such that it’s consistent, reliable, standardized, up to date.

Productive open data is the web 2.0 of the open data movement. The final frontier. The step that takes us beyond the ideological movement and into a society that is truly influenced and made better by widely accessible data.

Stephen Corwin is a web developer, musician, writer, and urban enthusiast based in Downtown Los Angeles. He is the founder of CityGrows, a govtech startup. Send him an email at stephen@citygro.ws, or follow him on Twitter: @stephen_corwin

This article was originally posted at blog.citygro.ws.