Open Data Policy-Making and its Impact on Decision-Makers within the Iranian Educational System

Research findings are indicative of malfunctioning of the very process of policy-making within the Iranian educational system, partly due to lack of cohesion, access to systemized information, and cooperation among the system’s divisions and subdivisions. Open data policy-making is a new approach in which attempts are made to increase the participation of different individuals and divisions in the process of policy-making. To explore the extent to which this approach is utilized within the Iranian educational system, and its impact, a group of 13 policy-making experts with working experiences at the ministerial, congressional, and the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution levels were interviewed extensively to the point of data saturation. As a result, 45 factors within the four dimensions of content, process, structure, and relation were identified. Further analyses of the data revealed %67 of the variance of synergy between policy-making divisions is explained by the requirements of open data policy-making. The highest effect of these requirements is seen to be on the dimensions of process and structure (%57).