Open public sector information: from principles to practice

Accessible information is the lifeblood of a robust democracy and a productive economy. As part of a worldwide movement, the Australian Government is fundamentally changing the way that information is valued, managed, used and shared with others. The concept that best captures this trend, both in Australia and internationally, is the term \u27public sector information\u27 (PSI). This describes data, information or content that is generated, collected, or funded by or for the government or public institutions. PSI is a valuable resource that underpins all the essential public functions that government discharges. It can be an equally valuable resource outside government. People and business can use PSI to evaluate, respond, research, plan, discover, invent, innovate and aspire. The true value of information is realised only when others can use and build upon it to create new ideas, inventions and strategies. Open PSI is the necessary policy setting to make that happen. It requires, in essence, that government information and data is managed in a way that makes it readily discoverable, accessible and reusable by business and the community. This report details the results of a survey conducted by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) on how 191 Australian Government agencies manage PSI. The survey was structured around the eight Principles on open public sector information (Open PSI principles) that were published by the OAIC in 2011. The key finding of this report is that Australian Government agencies are actively embracing an open access and proactive disclosure culture. The high response rate to this survey confirms that finding. The widespread and growing use of digital and web technologies to support a PSI transformation is another sign. There are nevertheless many policy challenges and practical obstacles that must be tackled. It is more a time of transition than fulfilment. This transition – or cultural shift – is more successful when built on four elements: agency leadership, officer innovation, community engagement and investment in information infrastructure. Those four elements were identified by agencies themselves as key issues in developing national information policy. Shortcomings in existing policies, structure and information management practices are highlighted by the survey responses: Transitioning to open access and proactive publication requires cultural change, including more active sponsorship of this philosophy by agency leaders; this is particularly important to overcome resistance or disengagement within agencies. Existing systems for record keeping, information governance, information release and user consultation are not suitably designed for the new era of open PSI, in which government information and data must be valued as a core agency asset and a national resource. Information management systems do not always apply uniformly across agencies; from an open PSI perspective there can be indefensible differences in information management practices across agency branches and locations. A great deal of valuable information is held by agencies in legacy documents that must be reformatted for digital publication; this can be a costly and technologically challenging process. Not all agencies have the technical specialisation and capacity to implement open PSI, on issues such as attachment of metadata, conformance to WCAG 2.0 and data release in an open and standards-based format. The default position of open access licensing is not clearly or robustly stated, nor properly reflected in the practice of government agencies. Agencies have been successful in identifying information that is required to be published under the Information Publication Scheme, but have not been as successful in identifying or prioritising other information that can be published through the agency website or on open data portals. Budgetary limitations hamper the capacity of agencies to be more dynamic in implementing an open PSI culture. An open PSI access strategy is vital to enable Australia to fully enjoy the economic, regulatory and cultural benefits of an open government model. Great strides to unlock PSI assets have recently been taken through the combined impact of the Government\u27s Gov 2.0 strategy, freedom of information changes, the innovation agenda, a shift in public service culture, and service delivery reform

Supporting Alternative Incentive Mechanisms for Digital Content: A Comparison of Canadian and US Policy

This paper compares the Government of Canada’s copyright focused approach for encouraging the production of digital content with the U.S. Government’s adoption of a range of incentive systems for the production of content through a content analysis of government policy papers. The first part of the paper examines Canadian policy outlined in the Improving Canada’s Digital Advantage consultation paper and the proposed amendments to the Copyright Act (Bill C-32). The paper argues the government is overly reliant on copyright to encourage the production of creative digital content. Though Bill C-32 would expand the definition of fair dealing and create a user generated content exception, the effectiveness of these measures is severely limited by through the proposed protections for technological protection measures. The second part of the paper examines innovative alternatives to copyright that are being promoted by the U.S. government. The Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive not only provides citizens with access to government data, but also calls on federal departments to use prizes to encourage innovative uses of the data. The U.S. National Institutes of Health has taken a leading role in promoting open access publication of research funded with federal monies by requiring deposit of publications resulting from research in the open access repository PubMed Central. The paper concludes by positing that Canada’s digital economy strategy would be strengthened by providing greater federal support for alternatives to intellectual property such as open data and open access and lessening the focus on copyright as an incentive digital content production

Who Do You Think We Are? The Data Publics in Digital Government Policy

This study provides conceptual clarity on open data users by connecting an empirical analysis of policy documents to emerging theoretical research on data publics. Releasing files to the public for reuse is the primary objective of policy on open government data. Recent public sphere scholarship provides insights into who reuses data by defining a data public as people who actively construct narratives with openly available digital sources. A content analysis of United States federal policy documents identified the language used to represent people who might reuse data. An inductive qualitative analysis of mandated digital strategy reports generated a taxonomy that characterizes people mentioned in open data policy. In addition to the taxonomy, this research contributes a set of propositions to predict data reuse based on these characteristics. The results encourage further dialog between public sphere and digital government scholars to establish testable explanations about data publics

Open Data

Open data is freely usable, reusable, or redistributable by anybody, provided there are safeguards in place that protect the data’s integrity and transparency. This book describes how data retrieved from public open data repositories can improve the learning qualities of digital networking, particularly performance and reliability. Chapters address such topics as knowledge extraction, Open Government Data (OGD), public dashboards, intrusion detection, and artificial intelligence in healthcare

The Social Dynamics of Open Data

The Social Dynamics of Open Data is a collection of peer reviewed papers presented at the 2nd Open Data Research Symposium (ODRS) held in Madrid, Spain, on 5 October 2016. Research is critical to developing a more rigorous and fine-combed analysis not only of why open data is valuable, but how it is valuable and under what specific conditions. The objective of the Open Data Research Symposium and the subsequent collection of chapters published here is to build such a stronger evidence base. This base is essential to understanding what open data’s impacts have been to date, and how positive impacts can be enabled and amplified. Consequently, common to the majority of chapters in this collection is the attempt by the authors to draw on existing scientific theories, and to apply them to open data to better explain the socially embedded dynamics that account for open data’s successes and failures in contributing to a more equitable and just society. CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction: The state of open data and open data research by François van Schalkwyk & Stefaan G Verhulst Chapter 2: The challenges of institutionalising open government data: A historical perspective of Chile’s OGD initiative and digital government institutions by Felipe González-Zapata & Richard Heeks Chapter 3: Beyond standards and regulations: Obstacles to local open government data initiatives in Italy and France by Federico Piovesan Chapter 4: Governance of open spatial data infrastructures in Europe by Glenn Vancauwenberghe & Bastiaan van Loenen Chapter 5: Beyond mere advocacy: CSOs and the role of intermediaries in Nigeria’s open data ecosystem by Patrick Enaholo Chapter 6: Rethinking civil society organisations working in the freedom of information and open government data fields by Silvana Fumega Chapter 7: Open your data and will ‘they’ build it? A case of open data co-production in health service delivery by Fabrizio Scrollini Chapter 8: The relational impact of open data intermediation: Experience from Indonesia and the Philippines by Arthur Glenn Maail Chapter 9: Smart cities need to be open: The case of Jakarta, Indonesia by Michael P Caňares Chapter 10: Protecting privacy while releasing data: Strategies to maximise benefits and mitigate risks by Joel Gurin, Matt Rumsey, Audrey Ariss & Katherine Garci

The untapped potential of digital citizen engagement in Morocco: a data-driven approach to online participation.

Aligning closely with trends in research impact, open government approaches are looking to incorporate public engagement and establish wider transparency as central operations. Samuel Lee, Fabian Seiderer and Lida Bteddini share findings from a World Bank project on digital participation and open data in Morocco. They find that greater access and use of public sector data can result in increased civic participation and socio-economic benefits

TRANSPARENCY-ORIENTED DIGITAL TRANSFOR-MATION: REASERCH ISSUES FOR OPEN GOVERNMENT DATA FROM POLICY DOCUMENTS

The digital transformation of government initially focused on the internal processes and work practices of government agencies, and then on the channels and ways of services provision to citizens and firms, as well as on the services themselves, and aimed mainly to increase efficiency. However, later it was extended towards the enhancement of government transparency and accountability, by exploiting the digital technologies in order to provide large amounts of information to citizens and firms about the activities and plans of government agencies, and recently to open and publish large datasets of them. This constitutes a big innovation/transformation, since previously government data were regarded as highly secret, and could be accessed only by limited numbers of competent public servants. The Open Government Data (OGD) have a great potential to promote not only government transparency and accountability, but also economic development (especially concerning the emerging data economy), scientific research as well as efficiency and effectiveness of other government agencies (beyond the one who publishes them). However, the OGD domain is relatively new, rapidly evolving, and has not reached and realized its full potential, so extensive research is required in order to support and facilitate progress in this direction, and finally increase the social and economic value generated from the large amounts of published OGD. So, it is quite important to define rationally the research agenda in this OGD domain: the main research areas as well as the particular research topics of each of them. For this purpose, some research has been conducted, which however is based exclusively on the review and analysis of previous scientific papers in this domain. In this paper we investigate the exploitation of recent OGD-related policy as well as legislation documents, as an additional and complementary source for extracting areas and topics in the OGD domain that require research in the near future. A methodology for this is developed, which is used in order to we analyse the ‘OECD Open Government Data Report – Enhancing Policy Maturity for Sustainable Impact’ and the EU Directive 2019/1024 on ‘Open Data and the Re-use of Public Sector Information’. This results in the identification of interesting new areas and topics of required OGD research, which are highly important and have not been identified by previous relevant research based on the review and analysis of scientific papers in this domain

Opening cities : open data in Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Sao Paulo

The research is part of a broader project on the impact of Open Data policies in Developing Countries (ODDC). Each report seeks to identify how open government data (OGD) policies emerge, and explores the impacts of these policies. This paper provides an overview of the Open Government Data initiative in the City of Buenos Aires. “Buenos Aires Data” is the government data catalogue, which publishes datasets in digital reusable formats, and around which applications are built linking other events and activities such as transportation and culture. However, data types, usability and transparency are found to be limited

Perspectives on Digital Sustainability

This habilitation thesis presents perspectives on digital sustainability, a novel concept connecting digitalization with sustainability. It explains why digital artifacts such as software or data have to meet technical characteristics of quality, transparency, semantics and multiple locations in order to serve society in the long term. However, these requirements are just necessary but not sufficient preconditions to consider digital artifacts sustainable. Their associated ecosystem of businesses, governments, and individuals must also meet the legal and organizational characteristics of open license, shared tacit knowledge, participation, good governance, and diversified funding. And, finally, sustainable digital artifacts must lead to ecological, societal and economical benefits. This thesis statement is discussed in the introductory chapter of the habilitation. It connects and summarizes 13 refereed publications clustered in five perspectives on digital sustainability: In the first perspective, the path of defining the concept of digital sustainability is summarized. This part starts with a publication that introduced an initial set of characteristics for digital sustainability (Stuermer, 2014). The following article connects digital sustainability with digital preservation (Stuermer and Abu-Tayeh, 2016). These studies have eventually led to an extended publication in a sustainability journal elaborating the basic conditions of digital sustainability in detail (Stuermer et al., 2017a). The second perspective includes recent publications on open source software (OSS) research scrutinizing how patterns of digital sustainability are applied within the software development industry. One publication analyzes feature requests within the Eclipse OSS community (Heppler et al., 2016). The following article develops a maturity model of Inner Source, a special form of OSS development practices in an organization (Eckert et al., 2017). And one study in a computer science journal addresses different types of OSS governance by comparing independent and joint communities (Eckert et al., 2019). The next perspective focuses on the procurement of information technology (IT) which involves critical topics of knowledge management and governance related to digital sustainability. Analyzing data crawled from the Swiss public procurement platform Simap.ch exposes lock-in effects, outsourcing decisions as well as multisourcing within the software industry. One article in this perspective introduces the methodology and the dataset pointing out the high level of direct awards within the IT sector (Stuermer et al., 2017b). Another publication tests hypotheses on contract choice in regard to knowledge specificity and task scope (Krancher and Stuermer, 2018a). And one study explains multisourcing decisions using a large dataset on public procurement of IT in Switzerland (Krancher and Stuermer, 2018b). The subsequent perspective highlights open data and linked data as another form of sustainable digital artifacts. One publication proposes a framework permitting the measurement of the impact of open data (Stuermer and Dapp, 2016). Another article introduces linked open government data (LOGD), a kind of graph-structured open data stored in different kinds of platforms (Hitz-Gamper et al., 2019). The final perspective extends the phenomenon of open data into the area of governmental services. By linking the concepts of public governance and open government one article shows how transparency and participation are achieved with digital tools (Stuermer and Ritz, 2014). Another publication includes an empirical analysis of the FixMyStreet open government platform in Zurich called “Züri wie neu” using open data and a user survey to identify the motivation of citizens using this digital tool (Abu-Tayeh et al., 2018)

Meta-Analysis: Trends of Digital Democracy Research Publications

Digital democracy has become a contemporary study in social and political science, but theoretically the term digital democracy does not yet have a definite pattern, this makes digital democracy fail to be understood both theoretically and practically. Therefore, this research has basic questions about; how the theoretical development of digital democracy through the trend of research publications based on the Scopus index. This article uses a qualitative description methodology, and data analysis techniques using research software; Vosviewer and NVivo 12 plus. The findings in this study see that scholars focus on the theme of e-government and digital political participation, in e-government the research theme focuses on government services through open government data and studies on the function of official government social media for public communication. While the research theme of digital political participation focuses on the study of e-voting and digital social movement. Digital democracy in a positive perspective can also encourage the character of a deliberative democratic system. Referring to the data of research publications that have been analyzed, the researcher concludes a new finding: that digital democracy can theoretically be categorized into two. First, the electoral aspect, which understands that digital democracy creates a digital transformation of government work, which is marked by open government data, digital services, and digital information. Second, the-non electoral aspect, which sees digital democracy as an opportunity for civil society to be involved in political participation in a country, such as electronic elections, online political participation, and digital activism.  Demokrasi digital menjadi suatu kajian yang kontemporer dalam ilmu sosial dan politik, namun secara teoritis term demokrassi digital belum mempunyai pola yang pasti, hal ini menjadikan demokrasi digital gagal dipahami baik secara teoritis maupun praktis. Karena itu penelitian ini mempunyai pertanyaan dasar tentang; bagaimana perkembangan teoritis demokrasi digital melalui trend publikasi penelitian berbasis indeks scopus. Artikel ini menggunakan metodologi deskripsi kualitatif, dan teknik analisis data menggunakan software penelitian; Vosviewer dan NVivo 12 plus. Temuan dalam penelitian ini melihat para sarjana fokus pada tema e-government dan partisipasi politik secara digital, dalam e-government tema penelitian fokus kepada pelayanan pemerintah melalui open data government dan kajian fungsi media sosial resmi pemerintah untuk komunikasi publik. Sedangkan tema penelitian partisipasi politik digital fokus pada kajian e-voting dan digital sosial movement. Demokrasi digital dalam perspektif positif juga dapat mendorong karakter sistem demokrasi yang deliberatif. Merujuk data publikasi penelitian yang telah dianalisis, peneliti menyimpulkan temuan baru: bahwa demokrasi digital secara teoritis dapat dikategorikan menjadi dua. Pertama, aspek elektoral yang memahami bahwa demokrasi digital membuat transformasi kerja pemerintahan secara digital, yang ditandai dengan open data government, pelayanan digital, dan informasi digital. Kedua, aspek non elektoral, yang melihat demokrasi digital menjadi peluang untuk masyarakat sipil terlibat dalam partisipasi politik dalam suatu negara, seperti pemilu elektronik, partisipasi politik onlline, dan aktivisme digital