Abstract
Under pressure to fight corruption, hold public officials accountable, and build trust with citizens, many governments pursue the quest for greater transparency. They publish data about their internal operations, externalize decision-making processes, establish digital inquiry lines to public officials, and employ other forms of transparency using digital means. Despite the presence of many transparency-enhancing digital tools, putting such tools together to achieve the desired level of digital transparency, to design entire government systems for digital transparency, remains challenging. Design principles and other design guides are lacking in this area. This article aims to fill this gap. We identify a set of barriers to digital transparency in government, define 16 design principles to overcome such barriers, and evaluate these principles using three case studies from different countries. Some principles apply to projects, others to systems, yet others to entire organizations. To achieve digital transparency, before building and deploying digital solutions, government organizations should build technological and institutional foundations and use such foundations to organize themselves for transparency. The proposed design principles can help develop and apply such foundations.
Highlights
Lack of transparency in government operations and decision-making processes is often connected to corruption scandals (Harrison & Sayogo, 2014), poor decision-making (Guillamon, Ríos, Gesuele, & Metallo, 2016), lack of accountability of public officials (Lourenço, 2015), and dysfunctional governance of government organizations (Kosack & Fung, 2014)
Creating digital transparency is a significant challenge faced by governments
Opening data does not result in digital trans parency and might only result in information overload for those wanting to examine such data
Summary
Lack of transparency in government operations and decision-making processes is often connected to corruption scandals (Harrison & Sayogo, 2014), poor decision-making (Guillamon, Ríos, Gesuele, & Metallo, 2016), lack of accountability of public officials (Lourenço, 2015), and dysfunctional governance of government organizations (Kosack & Fung, 2014). Various definitions and conceptualizations of transparency emphasize different aspects and formulate different ex pectations towards this concept. The latter include improved account ability (Peixoto, 2013), good governance (Ward, 2014), better decisionmaking (Navarro-Galera, Alcaraz-Quiles, & Ortiz-Rodríguez, 2016), less corruption (John C Bertot, Jaeger, & Grimes, 2010), and more openness (Frank & Oztoprak, 2015; Matheus & Janssen, 2015). We have planned this interview to last about one hour due to the wide range of the needed information During this time, we have several questions that we would like to cover.
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