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This article contributes to the growing body of literature within public management on open government data by taking a political perspective. We argue that open government data are a strategic resource of organizations and therefore organizations are not likely to share it. We develop an analytical framework for studying the politics of open government data, based on theories of strategic responses to institutional processes, government transparency, and open government data. The framework shows that there can be different organizational strategic responses to open data—varying from conformity to active resistance—and that different institutional antecedents influence these responses. The value of the framework is explored in two cases: a province in the Netherlands and a municipality in France. The cases provide insights into why governments might release datasets in certain policy domains but not in others thereby producing “strategically opaque transparency.” The article concludes that the politics of open government data framework helps us understand open data practices in relation to broader institutional pressures that influence government transparency.

Technology development and democratization have been identified as the general drivers of the worldwide thrust in transparency. But what transparency regimes do these drivers generate in different countries? This mixed method study indicates that national regimes are different due to pre-existing institutional differences and critical junctures in the historical development of transparency regimes. Our analysis shows that the U.S. transparency regime can be characterized as a rules-based approach while a principles-based transparency regime prevails in the Netherlands. This article nuances the debate about the global character of transparency and highlights two different outcomes of the push for transparency.

During recent years, the amount of data released on platforms by public administrations around the world have exploded. Open government data platforms are aimed at enhancing transparency and participation. Even though the promises of these platforms are high, their full potential has not yet been reached. Scholars have identified technical and quality barriers of open data usage. Although useful, these issues fail to acknowledge that the meaning of open data also depends on the context and people involved. In this study we analyze open data usage from a practice lens – as a social construction that emerges over time in interaction with governments and users in a specific context – to enhance our understanding of the role of context and agency in the development of open data platforms. This study is based on innovative action-based research in which civil servants’ and citizens’ initiatives collaborate to find solutions for public problems using an open data platform. It provides an insider perspective of Open Data Work. The findings show that an absence of a shared cognitive framework for understanding open data and a lack of high-quality datasets can prevent processes of collaborative learning. Our contextual approach stresses the need for open data practices that work on the basis of rich interactions with users rather than government-centric implementations.

Developments in open data have prompted a range of proposals and innovations in the domain of governance and public administration. Within the democratic tradition, transparency is seen as a fundamental element of democratic governance. While the use of open government data has the potential to enhance transparency and trust in government, realising any ideal of transparent democratic governance implies responding to a range of sociotechnical design challenges. In order to address these design challenges it is essential to adopt an interdisciplinary and stakeholder-engaged approach to research and innovation. In the current study, we describe a contextualist approach to the design of an open data collaboration platform in the context of an EU innovation project, focused on enhancing transparency and collaboration between citizens and public administrators through the use of open government data. We report on a collective intelligence scenario-based design process that has shaped the development of open data platform requirements and ongoing system engineering and evaluation work. Stakeholders across five pilot sites identified barriers to accessing, understanding, and using open data, and options to overcome these barriers across three broad categories: government and organisational issues; technical, data, and resource issues; and training and engagement issues. Stakeholders also expressed a broad variety of user needs across three domains: information needs; social-collaborative needs; and understandability, usability, and decision-making needs. Similarities and differences across sites are highlighted along with implications for open data platform design.

In this paper we present innovative solutions to the problem of transparency in Public Administrations (PAs) by opening up public data and services so that citizens participation is facilitated and encouraged with a Social Platform and a personalized user-friendly Transparency-Enhancing Toolset.