Abstract
"Open" is not just a fancy synonym for transparent and accountable. The "Open" in Open Government, Open Data, Open Information, and Open Innovation stands for the changing relation between citizens and authorities. Many citizens no longer accept the passive stance representative democracy held for them. They take an active approach in setting up better means of collaboration by ICTs. They demand and gain access to their historically grown collective knowledge stored in government data. Not just on a local level, they actively shape the political agenda. Open Government is to be seen in the context of citizens‘ rights: the right to actively participate in the process of agenda-setting and decision-making. Research into open government needs to address the value of the changing relation between citizens, public administration, and political authority. The paper argues finally for the application of the Public Value concept to research into open government.
Highlights
Questions such as how to effectively distinguish private data government owns from its people, and how to protect it from the public; as well as how government is going to blend open data with social data created by external stakeholders, will have to be discussed (DiMaio, 2011)
The changing relation between citizens and political authority becomes most visible in the collaboration open data platforms allow
That open government empowers the role of citizens – the governed – in relation to government
Summary
Mass media and industrial information economy have been the context in which complex modern societies have evolved. Crouch picked the relation between citizens and democratic institutions as a central theme in his work about post-democracy. Instead of raising the question how ICTs can serve in a more participatory democracy, Crouch only very generally asked what could be done to make the democratic quality of communities a topic on the agenda. Almost simultaneously (2007), Coleman came up with similar analyses of the shortcomings of current institutional arrangements He identified a deliberative deficit in contemporary democracies due to “an absence of spaces or occasions for the public to engage in open and critical discussion in which opinions can be exchanged and reviewed and policy decision influenced” Political decision makers need to understand that the deployment of ICTs in democracy (i.e. eDemocracy) only makes sense if it creates additional public value
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