Open data work: understanding open data usage from a practice lens

Introduction

Openness is considered a good governance principle. In this light open government data initiatives have exploded around the world (Vetrò et al., 2016). Open government data (OGD) are non-privacy-restricted and non-confidential data, produced with public money and made available without any restrictions on their usage or distribution (Janssen et al., 2012: 258). The release of OGD is stimulated by initiatives such as the international Open Government Partnership, in which more than 75 countries are participating (Open Government Partnership, 2017). OGD are said to be the goldmine in public administration (Kroes, 2011) and are expected to strengthen democratic and governance processes (Safarov et al., 2017). However, up until now the use of these data has been lagging behind and the actual impact is limited (Attard et al., 2015; Ruijer and Martinius, 2017). Part of the problem has been identified in the current data management and publication practices of governments, raising practical barriers for users of OGD (Dawes and Helbig, 2010). Consequently, attention has been paid in OGD literature to uniform user barriers in the form of technical and quality issues, for example (Dawes et al., 2016; Zuiderwijk and Janssen, 2014).

This rapidly growing new field has attracted scholars and practioners with differing understandings and views of OGD (Gonzalez-Zapata and Heeks, 2015). These perspectives have produced important understandings but generally fail to produce an in-depth understanding of what actually occurs in the interaction between government organizations and citizens’ initiatives when using OGD. Usage patterns of technology are often regarded as rational and generic rather than subjective and contextual (Fulk et al., 1990). Meijer et al. (2014) stress that OGD and their uses should also be studied as social constructions that emerge over time in a specific context, leading to a richer insight into the dynamics and complexity of OGD usage. To enhance our understanding of the underlying patterns of the social construction of OGD, we need to study how government organizations generate – or do not generate – access to OGD, how they interact with citizens’ initiatives and how a practice of OGD usage is socially constructed in a specific situation.

The aim of this study is to obtain insight into actual OGD usage and to enhance our understanding of the role of context and agency for OGD usage. This research builds upon fundamental insights from studies of organizational usage of information systems such as the social construction of technology (Bijker, 2012), technology structuration (Orlikowski, 1992) and technology enactment (Fountain, 2001). Orlikowski (2000) summarizes these insights with the term ‘practice lens’. This lens enables us to examine how people interact with technology and is better able to explain emergence and change in both technologies and their use in context (Orlikowski, 2000: 404). This theoretical perspective helps us to understand OGD usage not as it should be but as it is.

The article presents results from innovative action-based research on concrete OGD usage. In our study civil servants collaborate with representatives of grassroots organizations in order to find insights and solutions for public problems based on OGD. This research contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it contributes to the literature on transparency and OGD by enhancing our understanding of how OGD practices are socially constructed by a variety of actors in a specific contextual situation. This study goes beyond the uniform dos and don’ts as many of the analyses of barriers and drivers do (Zuiderwijk and Janssen, 2014). Rather it emphasizes the need for OGD practices that work on the basis of rich interactions and collaborative work with citizens’ initiatives rather than government-centric implementations. Second, it contributes to the literature on collaborative learning processes (Dillenbourg, 1999; Fung, 2004; Johnson and Johnson, 1996) by providing further insight into the construction of joint knowledge based on OGD in collaboration with others. Third, our study contributes to the literature by connecting instrumental debates about OGD to perspectives on technological practices developed in the organization science, sociology and information systems (Kling, 1991; Orlikowski, 2000, 2010). It enhances our understanding of the role of context and agency in the development of technology or more specifically in the development of OGD platforms.

Open data use from a practice lens

The expectations of OGD are high, but the full potential of OGD has not yet been reached (Safarov et al., 2017; Worthy, 2015). The OGD process is complex (Zuiderwijk and Janssen, 2014). The process of implementation, also called the OGD life cycle (Attard et al., 2015), consists of data creation, data publishing, findability, usage and discussion around data (Zuiderwijk and Janssen, 2014). This process is in line with the goals of open government: transparency and participation (Meijer et al., 2012). In order to advance the goals of open government, an OGD platform should enable data discusssion as well as facilitate collaboration between government and citizens (Ruijer et al., 2017; Sieber and Johnson, 2015; Zuiderwijk and Janssen, 2014). After all, the construction of knowledge depends upon relations with others (Fung, 2004; Johnson and Johnson, 1996). It requires collaborative learning, a process which occurs when a group works together to acccomplish shared goals (Johnson and Johnson, 1996). Currently, however, governments mainly focus on what Sieber and Johnson (2015) call ‘data over the wall’, where governments publish OGD via a portal and where interaction and participation with citizens is limited. However, in order to advance the goals of open government it is important to further reflect on the possibilities of OGD usage and not simply view publishing OGD as an end point (Sieber and Johnson, 2015).

In the current literature, the possibilities of OGD usage are presented from differing perspectives (Gonzalez-Zapata and Heeks, 2015). Based on a literature review, Gonzalez-Zapata and Heeks (2015) distinguish four differing perspectives: the bureaucratic perspective is associated with OGD policy; the political perspective views OGD as a fundamental right; the economic perspective conceives OGD as a way of economic growth and the technological perspective focuses on technology design. These perspectives have generated various insights into opportunities, barriers, differing stakeholders of OGD usage and in the roles and relationships between government and stakeholders (Dawes et al., 2016; Sieber and Johnson, 2015). A dominant idea in the studies of OGD is that barriers need to be identified and strategies need to be developed to tackle these barriers (Zuiderwijk and Janssen, 2014). Although important, these perspectives do not analyze how governments and citizens actually use OGD. In fact, based on a systematic literature review, Safarov et al. (2017) point out that little is known about the types of utilization of OGD citizens are interested in. Therefore in this article we argue that in order to better understand the complexity of OGD usage we should analyze how governments and citizens interact over OGD platforms and what they actually do with OGD in their everyday life. In short, a practice perspective is missing. Or an analysis of ‘Open Data Work’ (see also Colebatch et al., 2010, who speak of ‘Policy work’).

A practice lens posits users as constituing structures in their recurrent use of technology (Orlikowski, 2000). It focuses on what actually happens in a specific context: the everyday activity is the object of analysis (Orlikowski, 2010). The practice lens is associated with the label practice oriented approach which focuses on what people actually do rather than what they say they do (Corradi et al., 2010). The practice lens builds on theories regarding organizational usage of information systems: technology structuration (Orlikowski, 1992), the social construction of technology (Bijker, 2012) and technology enactment (Fountain, 2001). Orlikowski’s strucurational model of technology (1992) is aimed at analyzing the nature and role of technology in organizations. This model assumes that technology has certain structural properties, but these properties are enacted by users who use technology in a specific institutional context (Orlikowski, 1992; Meijer, 2008). Structurational models of technology are highly influenced by social constructivism (Bijker, 2012; Orlikowski, 2000; Pinch and Bijker, 2012). Social construction places meaning making at the center. Human interpretations of the world produce social reality (Schneider and Sidney, 2009). In her Structurational Model of Technology, Orlikowski (1992) stresses that technology is socially constructed by users through the different meanings they attach to it and the features they use. Furthermore, institutional properties influence users in their interaction with technology, while interaction with technology also influences the institutional properties of an organization by reinforcing or transforming them (Orlikowski, 1992). In this vein, Fountain’s (2001) Technology Enactment Framework stresses the influence of context on the design, development, implementation and use of technology. The framework distinguishes objective properties of technology (hardware and software) from enacted technology (the perception of users as well as design and use of technology). The enactment of a technology-in-practice is situated within social systems; organizational forms (bureacuracy and interorganizational networks) and institutional arrangements (rules and requirements) (Fountain, 2001). Through the situated and recurrent nature of everyday activities, consequences or outcomes are produced and become reinforced or changed over time (Orlikowski, 2010: 25).

The practice perspective can be translated to working with OGD. It accommodates the users’ situated usage of OGD. Several elements can be distinguished (see online Figure 1): the organizational and institutional context (a) in which the OGD platform with its properties (b) is enacted by a user situated in the context (c), leading to certain outcomes (d). The practice perspective focuses on what structures emerge as people interact with an OGD platform in a specific context. It concentrates on what users actually do with OGD in their situated practice, how they interact with the OGD platform in ways not always anticipated by OGD providers or OGD platform designers. Users have the option to choose to do otherwise (Orlikowski, 2000). These anticipated and unanticipated outcomes have the potential for learning, improving OGD platforms and reinforcing or transforming organizational and institutional structures.

In this way the practice perspective adds value to the existing perspectives identified by Gonzalez-Zapata and Heeks (2015). The technological perspective has tended to focus on OGD platforms as a stable technology with embodied structures and on barriers that need to be overcome. The practice perspective adds to this perspective that it focuses on human agency and recognizes that emergence is inherent in social structures (Orlikowski, 2000). OGD usage greatly depends on the users’ understanding of the properties, the possibilities of the data platform and whether it actually facilitates transparency and participatory processes. The purpose of analyzing these practices is that it can lead to better OGD infrastructures by going beyond the instrumental identification of barriers and providing an insight into how an OGD platform is used by civil servants and citizens in a specific context. (Figure 1: please see supplementary material online)

Method

The empirical data were collected via action research. This method is often used within a practice perspective and is especially useful in technology studies (Orlikowski, 2010). Action research is an approach in which researcher and members of a social setting collaborate (Bryman, 2012). Action research embraces the notion of knowledge as socially constructed and, recognizing that all research is embedded within a system of values, promotes some model of human interaction (Brydon-Miller et al., 2003: 11).

The study took place in a rural province in the Netherlands. In collaboration with civil servants of the province it was decided to focus on the public problem of population decline because this issue was a priority for both the province and its inhabitants. This province is faced with the highest population decline in the Netherlands. In some regions of the province, the population will decline by almost 20 percent by 2040 (www.government.nl). In total 23 participants were part of this study: civil servants, representatives of citizens initiatives, students and researchers. The civil servants invited to join the study were both policy experts on population decline and OGD experts. The participating stakeholders consisted of members of two grassroots initiatives actively involved in dealing with population decline. Together with the researchers they formed a project group. During the project group meetings, scenarios were developed based on real-life issues that the representatives of grassroots initiatives were working on. Data collected before working with OGD consisted of minutes of meetings with civil servants and representatives between September 2015 and June 2016 and transcripts of interviews (see Table 1: please see supplementary material online).

In addition, slack capacity in the form of 10 students was added to the project group in order to contribute to finding solutions for the two scenarios. The students were recruited in order to work together with the civil servants and citizens around the scenarios. They participated for five weeks in the spring of 2016 on the OGD platform on population decline issues. In order to keep the students motivated a payment was promised after accomplishing the task. During these five weeks data were collected via interviews, face-to-face group meetings and students were asked to keep a log. During the first group meeting the students received training on how to work with the OGD platform. During the second group meeting halfway through the project the participants reflected on their findings: did they find relevant OGD? How had they used the OGD platform so far? After working with the OGD platform another meeting took place in which all the participants together reflected on the platform and the knowledge constructed and solutions found based on OGD. The data collected during the project meetings and during the five weeks of OGD work were analyzed using a thematic analysis.

In addition, we observed and analyzed the online activities of participants. A content analysis was conducted by two researchers that focused on the functionalities of the platform used, datasets used and type of online interaction. Based on a first round of open coding followed by selective and axial coding (Bryman, 2012), four categories of online interactions were identified (see also Baker et al., 2017): (1) Regulative, whereby the online interactions are focused on the organization of the joint tasks; (2) Informative, whereby the interactions focused on information sharing; (3) Evaluative, aimed at argumentative interaction; and finally (4) Constructive, aimed at collective interpretation and solutions to the problem. The intercoder reliability: Cohen’s kappa was 0.702, which reflects substantial agreement between the two coders.

Findings of the action research in the Netherlands

Conclusion and discussion

This article aimed to obtain insight into actual OGD usage and to enhance our understanding of the role of context and agency by analyzing OGD as a social construction from a practice lens. Our analysis shows what users do with OGD in particular situations, what impact it has and what we can learn from this about the skills, knowledge and technology that OGD work requires. Participants in our study constructed joint knowledge and solutions for a real-life issue thereby using an OGD platform. At the same time our research showed that the absence of a shared cognitive framework for understanding OGD and a lack of high-quality datasets could prevent processes of collaborative learning. Human interpretations produce the social world; shared understandings among people generate rules, norms, concepts, and institutions (Schneider and Sidney, 2009: 106). OGD usage is not simply about uniform barriers that need to be tackled but is a complex process of interaction with technology, communication among stakeholders and government organizations, and collaborative learning. In order to advance from a producer ‘data over the wall’ perspective to more open collaborative models that advance the goals of open government (Sieber and Johnson, 2015), communication between government and stakeholders over public problems and related relevant high-quality OGD is essential.

Our study has several theoretical implications. First of all, our findings connect well to the discussion in the literature about nominal and effective transparency. This discussion revolves around the question whether transparency can exist if there is no one to make use of it. Effective transparency requires receptors capable of processing, digesting and using information (Heald, 2006). These insights can be translated to OGD and, more specifically, to local practices around OGD platforms. While previous analyses of OGD platforms focus on nominal transparency by removing generic barriers, the practice lens that we applied provides insights that can help to strengthen the contribution of OGD to effective transparency. The action research shows that this is not an easy task since there is bound to be a mismatch between the needs and expectations of users and the possibilities offered by available datasets. Our focus on OGD work actually helps to see how different actors make an effort to turn nominal transparency into effective transparency. An approach that entails frequent interactions with users of OGD can help to construct new realities that will eventually benefit more effective reuse of OGD. In our study, students had a key role in open data work. For practitioners it might therefore be interesting to explore collaborations with higher education or even high schools. In our study students not only used datasets but also other types of information for their report. This information was needed because of the lack of available datasets but also in order to gain a better insight into the scenario. This seems to indicate that when using societal issues as point of departure, more is needed than the reuse of datasets; other sources of information can be valuable as well.

Second, our action-based research is an example of how organizations can start a collaborative learning process around OGD and could be followed up by ongoing (digital) interactions to facilitate the learning process that is to result in shared understandings and meaningful OGD practices. As Andriessen et al. (2013) point out, knowledge lies less in databases than in people; it has to be disclosed by collaborative activities. Our study highlights that meaningful OGD provision requires that government organizations engage in a dialogue and learning process with citizens and other stakeholders: learning on the job. Thus, government organizations need to heed the generic guidelines that have been identified in the literature (Dawes et al., 2016; Zuiderwijk and Janssen, 2014) but, in addition, they should explore potential uses in interaction with stakeholders to develop more meaningful forms of transparency.

Third, this article connects instrumental debates about open government usage to nuanced perspectives on technological practices as developed in the fields of organization science, sociology and information systems research (Kling, 1991; Orlikowski, 1992, 2000, 2010). For this reason, we conceptualized OGD usage as OGD work: users actively working with OGD to provide meaning. In line with Orlikowski (2010), we shifted the focus of the analysis from the OGD platforms to the people that develop and use these technologies. Usage of technology is subject to contextual influence in the form of widespread norms and pressure for sense making (Fulk et al., 1990). Connecting to users and building useful forms of OGD usage requires new approaches. As Sieber and Johnson (2015) point out, participatory OGD models demand a shifting role of government. Governments must trust that stakeholders can provide real value and must value their perspectives and participation. Stakeholders expect government to be receptive about their contributions (Sieber and Johnson, 2015).

Some limitations can be pointed out as well. The lack of high-quality datasets influenced working with data and the technology. The availability of more high-quality datasets might have led to other results. In addition, this study was conducted in a province in the Netherlands. The Netherlands scores low on the international corruption perceptions index (Transparency International, 2017) and high on the international Open Data Barometer (Open Data Barometer, 2016). In other countries, other responses might be found. Yet, our research approach seems promising for local governments in other countries in order to develop OGD practices that work on the basis of rich interactions and collaborative work with users. Our research highlights that technology is both facilitating and constraining for OGD work and thus a specific understanding of technology-in-context is needed to provide relevant tools. A more participatory approach to the development of OGD platforms is needed to prevent a situation where there are great technological opportunities but no usage.

Supplemental Material