This sort of project is most suited for a highly-populated ciy with capabilities already in place for collecting data. Companies which collect these sorts of data can be advantageous, and it is ideal if the city government has a close, cooperative working relationship with these companies.

As the project’s success depends on the willingness of the private sector to share proprietary data, these relationships are helpful. In Seoul’s case, this gave them access to datasets without any additional cost. Such sets may also be purchased, but this would need to be factored into budgeting. In Seoul’s case, carefully laid-out memoranda of understanding helped to create greater understanding and cooperation between the private and public sectors.

Given the careful nature of this cooperative relationship, the security of the data sets is paramount. Their unauthorized distribution could potentially be very damaging to the relationship between cities and partner companies and the ability for the city to form such relationships in the future. The physical nature of the campus is what separates this project from more traditional open data projects. While it could be feasible to monitor and control distribution of data by other means, the use of the physical campus with a VDI has given Seoul administrators very careful control to ensure the safety of the data. In terms of privacy, data anonymity was necessary in Korea, and in other national legal contexts, requirements may be even stricter.

Additionally, for budget savings, open source solutions can be employed for much of the analytical software.