Creating public value through Open Government: Perspectives, experiences and applications

Abstract

More and more, technology and policy changes are stimulating innovative adoptions that promise to create and deliver public values through more effective public services and programs or smarter government decisions and policies. The availability of data and the effective use of new strategies and technologies, such as Big Data, semantic Web, social media, data visualizations and analytics, together with the adoption of open and collaborative approaches among government, industry, NGOs, and citizens provide new opportunities to enhance transparency and accountability of government operations, facilitate the co-design of services, generate new venues for citizen participation, streamline operations, and reduce costs, and consequently, promote technological innovations and economic development. What also have fueled the development are the Open Government Initiatives from the Obama administration, as well as similar open government initiatives of other States internationally. Since 2009, the US government and governments around the world have developed policy initiatives that promote disclosure of information held by both public and private entities [20,21]. Through the release of the Open Government Directive, the administration intended to promote transparency in government operations, participation from the public in decision making, and collaboration with multiple and diverse stakeholders [16]. The impact of the Directive efforts went beyond US and lead to an international effort of promoting open government through The Open Government Partnership [10]. However, open government initiatives overall have encountered many difficulties [22,27], and critics has pointed out that open government has a strong focus on technology solution instead of adapting organizational practices, policy and culture, lack of integration with existing legislation and regulation, lack of clear definition and measurable goals, divergent and ambiguous goals, and uncertain sustainability to the next administration [25,28]. In addition, the tradeoffs of transparency and national security, as well as economic return were criticized to be not carefully studied and articulated [4]. Similarly, after a few years into the implementation of open government policies, research remains limited in this area,