Publishing the data alone is not enough to realize the desired impact in the agricultural sector. Some stakeholders are not interested in data: they are interested in services being built with the available data and information. Therefore, the establishment of an active open data community is needed, facilitating interaction and communication amongst everybody interested and/or involved in open data and the re-use of information and data. Interaction, collaboration and trainings between a wide range of actors, from NGOs to the private sector to individual citizens is needed to foster the development of new innovative products and services that will help realise the intended goals in the agricultural sector
One of the first steps in building such a open data ecosystem is to reach out to the community early in the development process of the open data strategy to existing local local initiatives, stakeholders and other actors and to listen to their information need, as recommended as a best practice by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Strategies for stakeholder engagement can be found in the World Bank Open Data Toolkit and co-creation for tech developments in existing networks.
Once the open data is published it is important to maintain the dialog with stakeholders and to create feedback loops between the open data users and the open data producers to report mistakes in the data, provide new complementary data or to express insights of new needs. These feedback loops can be beneficial for the data providers as well and are likely to result in a higher quality and a better understanding of the data.