Bernd W. Wirtz, Robert Piehler, Marc-Julian Thomas & Peter Daiser in Public Management Review: “Open government has become an important topic in democratically developed societies. Its key aims are to increase transparency, citizen trust and public participation. Against this background, the article focuses on perceived barriers opposing the introduction of open government data. On the basis of cognitive theory and a literature review, the essential factors that impede public servants in implementing open government data are conceptualized and summarized in a model. The perceived risk-based attitude of public servants is identified as the main barrier. Other significant obstacles include perceived legal barriers, perceived hierarchical structuring of authorities, perceived bureaucratic decision-making culture and perceived organizational transparency….(More)”
OpenData.Innovation: an international journey to discover innovative uses of open government data
Nesta: “This paper by Mor Rubinstein (Open Knowledge International) and Josh Cowls and Corinne Cath (Oxford Internet Institute) explores the methods and motivations behind innovative uses of open government data in five specific country contexts – Chile, Argentine, Uruguay, Israel, and Denmark; and considers how the insights it uncovers might be adopted in a UK context.
Through a series of interviews with ‘social hackers’ and open data practitioners and experts in countries with recognised open government data ‘hubs’, the authors encountered a diverse range of practices and approaches in how actors in different sectors of society make innovative uses of open government data. This diversity also demonstrated how contextual factors shape the opportunities and challenges for impactful open government data use.
Based on insights from these international case studies, the paper offers a number of recommendations – around community engagement, data literacy and practices of opening data – which aim to support governments and citizens unlock greater knowledge exchange and social impact through open government data….(More)”
The Values of Public Library in Promoting an Open Government Environment
Djoko Sigit Sayogo et al in the Proceedings of the 17th International Digital Government Research Conference on Digital Government Research: “Public participation has been less than ideal in many government-implemented ICT initiatives. Extant studies highlight the importance of public libraries as an intermediary between citizens and government. This study evaluates the role of public libraries as mediating the relationship between citizens and government in support of an open government environment. Using data from a national survey of “Library and Technology Use” conducted by PEW Internet in 2015, we test whether a citizen’s perception of public values provided by public libraries influence the likelihood of the citizen’s engagement within open-government environment contexts. The results signify a significant relationship between certain public values provided by public libraries with the propensity of citizens engaging government in an online environment. Our findings further indicate that varying public values generate different results in regard to the way citizens are stimulated to use public libraries to engage with government online. These findings imply that programs designed and developed to take into account a variety of values are more likely to effectively induce citizen engagement in an open government environment through the mediation of public libraries….(More)”
If you build it… will they come?
Laura Bacon at Omidyar Network: “What do datasets on Danish addresses, Indonesian elections, Singapore Dengue Fever, Slovakian contracts, Uruguayan health service provision, and Global weather systems have in common? Read on to learn more…
On May 12, 2016, more than 40 nations’ leaders gathered in London for an Anti-Corruption Summit, convened by UK Prime Minister David Cameron. Among the commitments made, 40 countries pledged to make their procurement processes open by default, with 14 countries specifically committing to publish to the Open Contracting Data Standard.
This conference and these commitments can be seen as part of a larger global norm toward openness and transparency, also embodied by the Open Government Partnership, Open Data Charter, and increasing numbers of Open Data Portals.
As government data is increasingly published openly in the public domain, valid questions have been raised about what impact the data will have: As governments release this data, will it be accessed and used? Will it ultimately improve lives, root out corruption, hold answers to seemingly intractable problems, and lead to economic growth?*
Omidyar Network — having supported several Open Data organizations and platforms such as Open Data Institute, Open Knowledge, and Web Foundation — sought data-driven answers to these questions. After a public call for proposals, we selected NYU’s GovLab to conduct research on the impact open data has already had. Not the potential or prospect of impact, but past proven impact. The GovLab research team, led by Stefaan Verhulst, investigated a variety of sectors — health, education, elections, budgets, contracts, etc. — in a variety of locations, spanning five continents.
Their findings are promising and exciting, demonstrating that open data is changing the world by empowering people, improving governance, solving public problems, and leading to innovation. A summary is contained in thisKey Findings report, and is accompanied by many open data case studies posted in this Open Data Impact Repository.
Of course, stories such as this are not 100% rosy, and the report is clear about the challenges ahead. There are plenty of cases in which open data has had minimal impact. There are cases where there was negative impact. And there are obstacles to open data reaching its full potential: namely, open data projects that don’t respond to citizens’ questions and needs, a lack of technical capacity on either the data provider and data user side, inadequate protections for privacy and security, and a shortage of resources.
But this research holds good news: Danish addresses, Indonesian elections,Singapore Dengue Fever, Slovakian contracts, Uruguayan health service provision, Global weather systems, and others were all opened up. And all changed the world by empowering citizens, improving governance, solving public problems, and leading to innovation. Please see this report for more….(More)”
See also odimpact.org
Outstanding Challenges in Recent Open Government Data Initiatives
Paper by Usamah A. Algemili: “In recent years, we have witnessed increasing interest in government data. Many governments around the world have sensed the value of its passive data sets. These governments started their Open Data policies, yet many countries are on the way converting raw data into useful representation. This paper surveys the previous efforts of Open Data initiatives. It discusses the various challenges that open data projects may encounter during the transformation from passive data sets towards Open Data culture. It reaches out project teams acquiring their practical assessment. Thus, an online form has been distributed among project teams. The questionnaire was developed in alignment with previous literature of data integration challenges. 138 eligible professional participated, and their responds has been analyzed by the researcher. The result section identifies the most critical challenges from project-teams’ point-of-view, and the findings show four obstacles that stand out as critical challenges facing project teams. This paper casts on these challenges, and it attempts to indicate the missing gap between current guidelines and practical experience. Accordingly, this paper presents the current infrastructure of Open Data framework followed by additional recommendations that may lead to successful implementation of Open Data development….(More)”
Fifty Shades of Open
Jeffrey Pomerantz and Robin Peek at First Monday: “Open source. Open access. Open society. Open knowledge. Open government. Even open food. Until quite recently, the word “open” had a fairly constant meaning. The over-use of the word “open” has led to its meaning becoming increasingly ambiguous. This presents a critical problem for this important word, as ambiguity leads to misinterpretation.
“Open” has been applied to a wide variety of words to create new terms, some of which make sense, and some not so much. When we started writing this essay, we thought our working title was simply amusing. But the working title became the actual title, as we found that there are at least 50 different terms in which the word “open” is used, encompassing nearly as many different criteria for openness. In this essay we will attempt to make sense of this open season on the word “open.”
Opening the door on open
The word “open” is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a very old one in the English language, harking back to Early Old English. Unlike some words in English, the definition of “open” has changed very little in the intervening thousand-plus years: the earliest recorded uses of the word are completely consistent with its modern usage as an adjective, indicating a passage through or an access into something (Oxford English Dictionary, 2016).
This meaning leads to the development in the fifteenth century of the phrases “open house,” meaning an establishment in which all are welcome, and “open air,” meaning unenclosed outdoor spaces. One such unenclosed outdoor space that figured large in the fifteenth century, and continues to do so today, is the Commons (Hardin, 1968): land or other resources that are not privately owned, but are available for use to all members of a community. The word “open” in these phrases indicates that all have access to a shared resource. All are welcome to visit an open house, but not to move in; all are welcome to walk in the open air or graze their sheep on the Commons, but not to fence the Commons as part of their backyard. (And the moment at which Commons land ceases to be open is precisely the moment it is fenced by an owner, which is in fact what happened in Great Britain during the Enclosure movement of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.)
Running against the grain of this cultural movement to enclosure, the nineteenth century saw the circulating library become the norm — rather than libraries in which massive tomes were literally chained to desks. The interpretation of the word “open” to mean a shared resource to which all had access, fit neatly into the philosophy of the modern library movement of the nineteenth century. The phrases “open shelves” and “open stacks” emerged at this time, referring to resources that were directly available to library users, without necessarily requiring intervention by a librarian. Naturally, however, not all library resources were made openly available, nor are they even today. Furthermore, resources are made openly available with the understanding that, like Commons land, they must be shared: library resources have a due date.
The twentieth century saw an increase in the use of the word “open,” as well as a hint of the confusion that was to come about the interpretation of the word. The term “open society” was coined prior to World War I, to indicate a society tolerant of religious diversity. The “open skies” policy enables a nation to allow other nations’ commercial aviation to fly through its airspace — though, importantly, without giving up control of its airspace. The Open University was founded in the United Kingdom in 1969, to provide a university education to all, with no formal entry requirements. The meaning of the word “open” is quite different across these three terms — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that these terms use different shadings of the word.
But it has been the twenty-first century that has seen the most dramatic increase in the number of terms that use “open.” The story of this explosion in the use of the word “open” begins, however, with a different word entirely: the word “free.”….
Introduction
Opening the door on open
Speech, beer, and puppies
Open means rights
Open means access
Open means use
Open means transparent
Open means participatory
Open means enabling openness
Open means philosophically aligned with open principles
Openwashing and its discontents
Conclusion“
Crowdsourced Deliberation: The Case of the Law on Off-Road Traffic in Finland
Tanja Aitamurto and Hélène Landemore in Policy & Internet: “This article examines the emergence of democratic deliberation in a crowdsourced law reform process. The empirical context of the study is a crowdsourced legislative reform in Finland, initiated by the Finnish government. The findings suggest that online exchanges in the crowdsourced process qualify as democratic deliberation according to the classical definition. We introduce the term “crowdsourced deliberation” to mean an open, asynchronous, depersonalized, and distributed kind of online deliberation occurring among self-selected participants in the context of an attempt by government or another organization to open up the policymaking or lawmaking process. The article helps to characterize the nature of crowdsourced policymaking and to understand its possibilities as a practice for implementing open government principles. We aim to make a contribution to the literature on crowdsourcing in policymaking, participatory and deliberative democracy and, specifically, the newly emerging subfield in deliberative democracy that focuses on “deliberative systems.”…(More)”
Impact of open government: Mapping the research landscape
Stephen Davenport at OGP Blog: “Government reformers and development practitioners in the open government space are experiencing the heady times associated with a newly-defined agenda. The opportunity for innovation and positive change can at times feel boundless. Yet, working in a nascent field also means a relative lack of “proven” tools and solutions (to such extent as they ever exist in development).
More research on the potential for open government initiatives to improve lives is well underway. However, keeping up with the rapidly evolving landscape of ongoing research, emerging hypotheses, and high-priority knowledge gaps has been a challenge, even as investment in open government activities has accelerated. This becomes increasing important as we gather to talk progress at the OGP Africa Regional Meeting 2016(link is external) and GIFT(link is external) consultations in Cape Town next week (May 4-6) .
Who’s doing what?
To advance the state of play, a new report commissioned by the World Bank, “Open Government Impact and Outcomes: Mapping the Landscape of Ongoing Research”(link is external), categorizes and takes stock of existing research. The report represents the first output of a newly-formed consortium (link is external) that aims to generate practical, evidence-based guidance for open government stakeholders, building on and complementing the work of organizations across the academic-practitioner spectrum.
The mapping exercise led to the creation of an interactive platform (link is external) with detailed information on how to find out more about each of the research projects covered, organized by a new typology for open government interventions. The inventory is limited in scope given practical and other considerations. It includes only projects that are currently underway. It is meant to be a forward-looking overview, rather than a literature review–and are relatively large and international in nature.
Charting a course: How can the World Bank add value?
The scope for increasing the open government knowledge base remains vast. The report suggests that, given its role as a lender, convener, and a policy advisor the World Bank is well positioned to complement and support existing research in a number of ways, such as:
- Taking a demand-driven approach, focusing on specific areas where it can identify lessons for stakeholders seeking to turn open government enthusiasm into tangible results.
- Linking researchers with governments and practitioners to study specific areas of interest (in particular, access to information and social accountability interventions).
- Evaluating the impact of open government reforms against baseline data that may not be public yet, but that are accessible to the World Bank.
- Contributing to a better understanding of the role and impact of ICTs through work like the recently-published study (link is external)that examines the relationship between digital citizen engagement and government responsiveness.
- Ensuring that World Bank loans and projects are conceived as opportunities for knowledge generation, while incorporating the most relevant and up-to-date evidence on what works in different contexts.
- Leveraging its involvement in the Open Government Partnership to help stakeholders make evidence-based reform commitments….(More)
Supply and demand of open data in Mexico: A diagnostic report on the government’s new open data portal
Report by Juan Ortiz Freuler: “Following a promising and already well-established trend, in February 2014 the Office of the President of Mexico launched its open data portal (datos.gob.mx). This diagnostic –carried out between July and September of 2015- is designed to brief international donors and stakeholders such as members of the Open Government Partnership Steering Committee, provides the reader with contextual information to understand the state of supply and demand for open data from the portal, and the specific challenges the mexican government is facing in its quest to implement the policy. The insights offered through data processing and interviews with key stakeholders indicate the need to promote: i) A sense of ownership of datos.gob.mx by the user community, but particularly by the officials in charge of implementing the policy within each government unit; ii) The development of tools and mechanisms to increase the quality of the data provided through the portal; and iii) Civic hacking of the portal to promote innovation, and a sense of appropriation that would increase the policy’s long-term resilience to partisan and leadership change….(More)”
See also Underlying data: http://bit.ly/dataMXEng1; Spanish here: http://bit.ly/DataMxCastell; Underlying data:http://bit.ly/dataMX2
The Open Data Barometer (3rd edition)
The Open Data Barometer: “Once the preserve of academics and statisticians, data has become a development cause embraced by everyone from grassroots activists to the UN Secretary-General. There’s now a clear understanding that we need robust data to drive democracy and development — and a lot of it.
Last year, the world agreed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — seventeen global commitments that set an ambitious agenda to end poverty, fight inequality and tackle climate change by 2030. Recognising that good data is essential to the success of the SDGs, the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and the International Open Data Charter were launched as the SDGs were unveiled. These alliances mean the “data revolution” now has over 100 champions willing to fight for it. Meanwhile, Africa adopted the African Data Consensus — a roadmap to improving data standards and availability in a region that has notoriously struggled to capture even basic information such as birth registration.
But while much has been made of the need for bigger and better data to power the SDGs, this year’s Barometer follows the lead set by the International Open Data Charter by focusing on how much of this data will be openly available to the public.
Open data is essential to building accountable and effective institutions, and to ensuring public access to information — both goals of SDG 16. It is also essential for meaningful monitoring of progress on all 169 SDG targets. Yet the promise and possibilities offered by opening up data to journalists, human rights defenders, parliamentarians, and citizens at large go far beyond even these….
At a glance, here are this year’s key findings on the state of open data around the world:
- Open data is entering the mainstream.The majority of the countries in the survey (55%) now have an open data initiative in place and a national data catalogue providing access to datasets available for re-use. Moreover, new open data initiatives are getting underway or are promised for the near future in a number of countries, including Ecuador, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Nepal, Thailand, Botswana, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda. Demand is high: civil society and the tech community are using government data in 93% of countries surveyed, even in countries where that data is not yet fully open.
- Despite this, there’s been little to no progress on the number of truly open datasets around the world.Even with the rapid spread of open government data plans and policies, too much critical data remains locked in government filing cabinets. For example, only two countries publish acceptable detailed open public spending data. Of all 1,380 government datasets surveyed, almost 90% are still closed — roughly the same as in the last edition of the Open Data Barometer (when only 130 out of 1,290 datasets, or 10%, were open). What is more, much of the approximately 10% of data that meets the open definition is of poor quality, making it difficult for potential data users to access, process and work with it effectively.
- “Open-washing” is jeopardising progress. Many governments have advertised their open data policies as a way to burnish their democratic and transparent credentials. But open data, while extremely important, is just one component of a responsive and accountable government. Open data initiatives cannot be effective if not supported by a culture of openness where citizens are encouraged to ask questions and engage, and supported by a legal framework. Disturbingly, in this edition we saw a backslide on freedom of information, transparency, accountability, and privacy indicators in some countries. Until all these factors are in place, open data cannot be a true SDG accelerator.
- Implementation and resourcing are the weakest links.Progress on the Barometer’s implementation and impact indicators has stalled or even gone into reverse in some cases. Open data can result in net savings for the public purse, but getting individual ministries to allocate the budget and staff needed to publish their data is often an uphill battle, and investment in building user capacity (both inside and outside of government) is scarce. Open data is not yet entrenched in law or policy, and the legal frameworks supporting most open data initiatives are weak. This is a symptom of the tendency of governments to view open data as a fad or experiment with little to no long-term strategy behind its implementation. This results in haphazard implementation, weak demand and limited impact.
- The gap between data haves and have-nots needs urgent attention.Twenty-six of the top 30 countries in the ranking are high-income countries. Half of open datasets in our study are found in just the top 10 OECD countries, while almost none are in African countries. As the UN pointed out last year, such gaps could create “a whole new inequality frontier” if allowed to persist. Open data champions in several developing countries have launched fledgling initiatives, but too often those good open data intentions are not adequately resourced, resulting in weak momentum and limited success.
- Governments at the top of the Barometer are being challenged by a new generation of open data adopters. Traditional open data stalwarts such as the USA and UK have seen their rate of progress on open data slow, signalling that new political will and momentum may be needed as more difficult elements of open data are tackled. Fortunately, a new generation of open data adopters, including France, Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, South Korea and the Philippines, are starting to challenge the ranking leaders and are adopting a leadership attitude in their respective regions. The International Open Data Charter could be an important vehicle to sustain and increase momentum in challenger countries, while also stimulating renewed energy in traditional open data leaders….(More)”