The Impact of Impediments on Open Government Data Use: Insights from Users

Abstract

Open Government Data (OGD) is interoperable data that is published on the Internet by public organizations and can be freely used and redistributed by users. OGD is expected to result in several benefits, such as innovative products and services, collective problem solving, and equal access to information. However, several impediments complicate the realization of the benefits. These impediments can impact the process of using OGD that consists of the four phases: motivation, search and evaluate, access and prepare, and aggregate and transform.In this paper, we examine the case of a data science project conducted by master's students to understand how impediments impact their use. In order to study this case, we use a mixedmethod approach combining a questionnaire sent to the 30 students and nine in-depth interviews.The analysis of the data allowed us to identify and discuss the impact of several impediments on use, such as difficulties in finding an idea and the lack of longitudinal data. Subsequently, we were able to give recommendations to publishers to improve their OGD portals, infrastructure, and data as well as opening up research directions in the OGD field.

Towards a Framework for Open Data Publishers: A Comparison Study Between Sweden and Belgium

“…The city of Namur has received no feedback on the impact of OGD (even though there is a feature on the portal where re-users can share their reuse), which the technical agent described as "pretty frustrating". The only identified reuse is a one-off collaboration with the University of Namur [7]. Data corrections are based on feedback received by e-mail from citizens or public agents.…”

Open Government Data as a Reform and Ecosystem : A conceptual framework for evolution and health

“…Our research was germinated in 2018 as part of a research collaboration. An early version of our framework was presented and discussed at an e-government workshop and evaluated in Belgium by Anthony Simonofski, Antoine Clarinval, Elisabeth Gebka, and me (Crusoe, Simonofski, Clarinval, and Gebka, 2019). The enricher framework is published in Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy (TGPPP).…”

“…The inductive content analysis started with the researchers individually analyzing the empirical material to then analyze it together, which is one way to ensure the quality of the findings (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005;Bengtsson, 2016). In the second stage, we verified and reflected on the tentative framework in three parallel processes: (1) academical discussions and peer-reviewed at an e-government workshop (Crusoe and Ahlin, 2019a), ( 2) evaluated with 30 master students in Belgium (Crusoe, Simonofski, Clarinval, and Gebka, 2019), and (3) discussions and reflections. The advantages of these parallel processes with reflections are adaptability to the needs of the framework, multiple forms of verification, and identify avenues of development.…”

“…In my research of Crusoe (2021a), this substitution was captured in resource allocation and cumbersome use. In my research of Crusoe, Simonofski, Clarinval, and Gebka (2019), enrichers spent more time preparing data of low quality. Energy is not isolated within an OGD ecosystem and can be loaded from or exported to other ecosystems.…”

“…If providers cannot publish data (e.g., as of revenue loss or laws (Barry and Bannister, 2014)), this situation prevents enrichers from coalescing nodes. Similarly, if providers provide low-quality data or low-quality access to their data, this situation can increase a need for extra energy and resources of enrichers, which makes a node more expensive to coalesce (Crusoe, Simonofski, Clarinval, and Gebka, 2019). At the same time, if providers cannot observe or identify the added value of enrichers, they can find it difficult to motivate energy investments into publishing and providing data (Crusoe, Simonofski, and Clarinval, 2020;Crusoe, 2021a).…”