The case for opening public and administrative data is usually made in the abstract. If the data existed in usable form, value would follow. The organisations actually building on public data know the gap between that assumption and reality. They keep solving the same problems through their own ingenuity: broken discovery, machine-unreadable formats, mismatched identifiers, missing metadata. Problems that arguably should not need private ingenuity to solve.
This roundtable is for organisations that work directly with public and administrative datasets: researchers, builders, analysts, and policy practitioners who have gone from 'the dataset exists' to 'we built something useful' and know exactly where that path broke. A smaller, focused room serves this topic better than a panel. The goal is candid accounts, not polished positions.
The conversation will move through three questions. Where has using public data produced something genuinely valuable, and what made that possible? Where is the value overstated, and what honest caveats does the room raise? And which break-points matter most: discovery, machine-readability, common identifiers, harmonised definitions, trust? The session will not attempt to produce policy recommendations or consensus positions.
Participants leave with a shared account of what India's public data is actually good for, and their name on a short, co-authored piece that puts those use cases on record. This is an invite-only session, kept small so the conversation can go somewhere.
