Governance, Transparency and the Collaborative Design of Open Data Collaboration Platforms: Understanding Barriers, Options, and Needs

Abstract

Developments in open data have prompted a range of proposals and innovations in the domain of governance and public administration. Within the democratic tradition, transparency is seen as a fundamental element of democratic governance. While the use of open government data has the potential to enhance transparency and trust in government, realising any ideal of transparent democratic governance implies responding to a range of sociotechnical design challenges. In order to address these design challenges it is essential to adopt an interdisciplinary and stakeholder-engaged approach to research and innovation. In the current study, we describe a contextualist approach to the design of an open data collaboration platform in the context of an EU innovation project, focused on enhancing transparency and collaboration between citizens and public administrators through the use of open government data. We report on a collective intelligence scenario-based design process that has shaped the development of open data platform requirements and ongoing system engineering and evaluation work. Stakeholders across five pilot sites identified barriers to accessing, understanding, and using open data, and options to overcome these barriers across three broad categories: government and organisational issues; technical, data, and resource issues; and training and engagement issues. Stakeholders also expressed a broad variety of user needs across three domains: information needs; social-collaborative needs; and understandability, usability, and decision-making needs. Similarities and differences across sites are highlighted along with implications for open data platform design.

Appendix 1

Sample scenarios
Entrepreneur Annie is interested in starting a locally based café/food business and would like to connect with public administrators and potential customers to find out if there is a demand for this new business, what kind of premises or permissions she might need, what supports are available and to connect with other people who might partner/work with her in starting this business. She would like to use technology to build local social networks to connect with her business peer network and build a local customer base.
Civic Joe is part of the civic hacker community and a member of an active citizen group. He is a keen advocate for social equality and feels that citizens need a more participatory democracy to create a better society for all. He is interested in open data as a means of opening access to public information and promoting transparency. He wants to be able to interact with public data to understand how public decisions are made, to give his views in an easy and transparent way and receive feedback on them from public administrators who area leading local projects, so that he feels he has been part of the decision and policy making process. Joe also wants to be able to share ideas and data with other citizen groups, with a view to collaborating on projects and common goals.
Jane is a public administrator in a Dublin Local Authority. Jane is helping to prepare a new plan to promote local community and economic development in Dublin and wants to explore how technology might be used to engage a wider demographic and to facilitate bottom up community building. Jane is particularly interested in consulting with young people and people with a disability or other citizens who may not engage in more formal consultations. Jane wants an easy to use platform to gather and give feedback to citizens on issues that matter to them to inform policy and to build public trust. Jane also wants to be able to negotiate and plan activities with other public administrators in her community development group in her local authority public administration offices. She wants both citizens and her colleagues in the local community development group to have some flexibility in the way they draw upon data and information when working together to develop community projects. Jane is very passionate about promoting local community and economic development in Dublin and she wants a platform and set of services that will help her do good work.
Citizen Kay is interested in putting down more roots and getting involved in her local community. She initially got involved in community issues when a group of her neighbours got together to object to a big new development that would have caused a lot of disturbance in her quiet street. As a concerned citizen she wants an easy way to put her issues on a public platform, to share and find out about local news, to discuss with other local residents and have an input into what is happening in her community. She would like a meaningful exchange with public administrators and to build local social networks to highlight the good things that are happening in her community and perhaps to start up a skillshare/ local volunteering exchange. Kay wants to be able to access information on other similar local groups, so that she can get advice on starting her own.