National Open Data Strategy

As Senior Policy Analyst at Costa Rica’s Judicial Branch, I led the nationwide implementation of the institution’s Open Data Protocol, translating it into a full pipeline of concrete actions: negotiating with department heads across the institution to secure their datasets, running information-needs analyses with data users, defining technical requirements for each dataset, and deciding which fields needed to be anonymized before release. I also drafted the internal regulation that operationalized the protocol and gave it the institutional backing to be enforced across departments.

I coordinated every phase of publication, from securing the raw data to structuring, documenting, and releasing it on the Judicial Branch’s Open Data Portal. Over 2022 and 2023, this doubled the number of publicly available datasets, strengthening data availability for social-policy analysis, service-delivery monitoring, and institutional accountability.

Publishing the data was only half the job. I organized activities to promote its use, working directly with journalists and researchers so they could actually put the Judicial Branch’s open data to work in their reporting and research.

Part of the strategy was making open data make sense to people outside the technical world. I coordinated a communication effort for non-technical audiences built around CONAMAJ’s annual Agenda, dedicating an edition to open data and translating dense technical concepts into plain language, so anyone could understand what open data is, why it matters, and how its core concepts work.

The work also reached beyond Costa Rica. Representing the Costa Rican Judicial Branch, I served as a technical advisor on open data for the Netherlands’ international cooperation and for USAID in Guatemala, sharing what we had built and supporting open-data efforts in another country’s justice sector.