The Right to Know Through the Freedom of Information and Open Data

In contemporary society, data and documents are "raw materials" to be fed into the information systems that govern most of the decisions made in the knowledge society. The growth of digital information and our increased ability to access it have triggered a change in our way of managing knowledge, for we are no longer just passively consuming information but are also actively creating, reusing, and sharing it for personal purposes (like civil activism or entrepreneurship) or social ones (such as data journalism). In this paper we focus on the right to know, especially as concerns public sector information, analyzing the deep transformation this right has undergone developing into a basic right proper. This evolution has been made possible by two enabling factors: (i) the introduction of new paradigms, such as open government data and (ii) changes in the legal framework. We be investigating in particular the correlation between the freedom of information and open data, considering that if we are to make full use of the right to know in the contemporary setting, we need to reuse data so as to make new knowledge out of them. The method of investigation consist in teasing out what the correlation is, in the Italian and other legal systems, between the freedom of information and open data with particular regard of the synergies and influences between the two phenomena. We discuss the legal issues arising out of that correlation and how it shapes relations between government and the collectivity, as well as how it affects digital rights.