Disintermediating Government: The role of Open Data and Smart Infrastructure

Abstract

Governments are increasingly negotiating the adoption of civic technologies to improve government functioning and to better connect with citizens. Despite the benefits of civic technology to make government more efficient, effective, and transparent, there are many challenges and even unintended outcomes to civic technology adoption. This exploratory paper presents a conceptual argument using two types of civic technology; open data and smart city infrastructure, as examples where their procurement by government can disintermediate government from citizen. This disintermediation can have both positive and negative outcomes for different parties. Four mechanisms that drive this disintermediation are discussed, including the use of legal frameworks, jumping of scales, conversion of public to private goods, and the creation of standards. These mechanisms can serve to shift the role of government from a service provider to a more background role as a data custodian or regulator, opening many opportunities for other actors, including private sector to assume critical roles in service provision.

Canadian smart cities: Are we wiring new citizen‐local government interactions?

“…This distinction is used to differentiate between social media as a form of citizen‐government connection, where a third party (the social media platform) intermediates the connection (Johnson et al 2020). This creates a connection where government has relinquished control over the form of citizen input (Johnson 2019). Of the 213 types of activity drawn from the SCC proposals, 10% were this form of informal transactive type, defined by the use of traditional social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.…”

“…Additionally, within the SCC process, there is an under-explored opportunity to extend citizen engagement beyond the two-stage process of plan creation and plan implementation, towards a recursive, citizen-centred learning process (Linders 2012; Rosen and Painter 2019). This would create a smart city engagement strategy that mirrors traditional planning processes, with mandated review cycles, continued evaluation, or even more radical opportunities for citizen engagement, such as citizen councils, juries, fabrication labs, and opportunities for direct co-creation of plans and projects (Johnson 2017;Calzada 2018). As Cardullo and Kitchin (2018) proposed, these types of engagement opportunities can move citizens up the ladder of citizen power, supporting more direct control over policy development, implementation, and evaluation, standing in direct contrast to much of the tokenistic practices of citizen inclusion that are prevalent in smart city discourse.…”

“…Current smart city discourse emphasizes the use of technology as an intermediary between citizen and government (Johnson 2017;Calzada 2018). Technology becomes a vector through which smart city programs are implemented, making smart city goals such as efficiency, sustainability, and improved service quality ideally obtained via technology implementation, rather than through other avenues.…”

Municipal Open Data Portals: Their Implementation in the Face of a Municipality’s Political and Territorial Reality

“…The ODP is designed as a public service (Johnson, 2019). In this sense, by publishing different datasets, the municipality fulfills its role as a service provider.…”

“…Yet, to reach its full potential, local open data initiatives are supposed to function as ecosystems: the form and nature of these ecosystems, however, still remains poorly documented (Zuiderwijk, Janssen and Davis, 2014). Finally, the target audience(s) for this potential value creation do not always seem to be clearly identified (Johnson, 2019). Thus, there remains a need to reflect on the political dimension of data liberation initiatives at the municipal scale, in order to more finely grasp the potential gap that exists between the promises pursued and the initiatives implemented.…”