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.