Open government data awareness: eliciting citizens’ requirements for application design

Abstract

Purpose Over the past decade, governments around the world have implemented open government data (OGD) policies to make their data publicly available, with collaboration and citizen engagement being one of the main goals. However, even though a lot of data is published, only a few citizens are aware of its existence and usefulness. The purpose of this paper is to identify the requirements for an application that raises awareness of Open Government Data (OGD) to citizens. Design/methodology/approach This study followed a design research science approach to collect citizens’ requirements for the design of such an application through interviews with 10 citizens and evaluated through user testing with 25 citizens. Findings This study identified and validated 11 requirements that can be implemented to raise citizens’ awareness of OGD. The most useful are listing OGD reuses with information about data used and receiving notification when a new OGD reuse is released. Furthermore, the evaluation results provided evidence of the effectiveness of using an application to improve OGD awareness to citizens. Originality/value This research provides requirements that can be used by developers to implement a usable tool to raise citizen awareness or by researchers to evaluate applications whose objective is to raise citizen awareness. Finally, it provides a mobile application that can used by developers to showcase their OGD reuses or by researchers to aware citizens of OGD through real-world examples.

Towards a taxonomy of research areas in open government data

“…These are some studies that discover the motivations for using open data. Studies related to user awareness include the work of Chokki et al . (2022), Nikiforova and Lnenicka (2021), Safarov (2020) and Alexopoulos et al.…”

“…These are some studies that discover the motivations for using open data. Studies related to user awareness include the work of Chokki et al (2022), Nikiforova and Lnenicka (2021), Safarov (2020) (3) OGD benefits. OGD initiatives are generally known for political, societal, economic, technical, and operational benefits (Ham et al, 2019;Janssen et al, 2012;Zuiderwijk et al, 2019).…”

Promoting data use through understanding user behaviors: A model for human open government data interaction

“…OGD portals have become increasingly popular in recent years, offering interactive tools to facilitate users to manipulate data. Previous research underscores the importance of raising awareness among OGD users and actively promoting OGD initiatives (Alexopoulos et al, 2023; Chokki et al, 2022). Aside from raising awareness, it's also important to equip OGD users with the necessary knowledge and skills to effectively engage with OGD.…”

Metadata quality matters in open government data (OGD) evaluation! An empirical investigation of OGD portals of the GCC constituents

“…This method was primarily chosen because the measure to be analyzed in this study, MQ, is a numerical measure. In addition, it has been widely used and proven effective in the context of open data research (Chokki et al, 2022;M achov a et al, 2018). The research design consists of four phases:…”

“…This method was primarily chosen because the measure to be analyzed in this study, MQ, is a numerical measure. In addition, it has been widely used and proven effective in the context of open data research (Chokki et al , 2022; Máchová et al , 2018). The research design consists of four phases: selection of the portals; definition of metrics used for the MQ assessment; collection of the portal data sets; calculation of portal MQ; and comparison of MQ among different countries. …”