Abstract
Companies use crowdsourcing to solve problems by using a widely dispersed and large group of individuals. Crowdsourcing and open innovation are not restricted to businesses. Governments also increasingly rely on open innovation principles to harness the expert knowledge of citizens and use citizens’ contributions to the public value creation process. While a large body of literature has examined the open government paradigm at the national level, we still know relatively little about how open government initiatives play out at the local level. Even less is known about whether open government initiatives may create positive spill overs, for example by having a trickle-down effect onto local tourism sectors. In this article, we present the City of Linz’s open government activities. More specifically, we review how the public administration implemented the interactive mapping and reporting application “Schau auf Linz“ (“Look at Linz“). Through our analysis of this case study, we show what role the local context and prior policies play in implementing open government initiatives on a local level. In addition, we discuss how this initiative, like others, leads to positive spill overs for the tourism sector.
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Notes
- 1.
One should note that recent political debates in the U.S., such as over the NSA scandal, reveal a discrepancy between the rhetoric of transparency and key policy issues in which the U.S. government acts opaquely. This variance raises two questions: first, to what extent are open government practices decoupled from the core activities of government? Second, where does the transparency imperative conflict with other policy goals? The answers to these questions, however, lie beyond the scope of this paper.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the City of Linz for collaborating with us in this research enterprise. Thomas Gegenhuber thanks the Austrian Academy of Sciences for funding his work.
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Etzelstorfer, S., Gegenhuber, T., Hilgers, D. (2016). Opening Up Government: Citizen Innovation and New Modes of Collaboration. In: Egger, R., Gula, I., Walcher, D. (eds) Open Tourism. Tourism on the Verge. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54089-9_18
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