Special Issue on Open Government

On January 2009, President Obama signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government. The memorandum declares the new administration’s commitment to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government and establishing a system linking three principles, namely, transparency, public participation, and collaboration.

Although there is agreement on the popularization of the term by the Obama Administration’s Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, the concept is not new. Despite the first written reference dates back to 1957, when Parks (1957) published “The open government principle: Applying the right to know under the Constitution,” its use goes back to the 70s, when the British government promoted several initiatives aimed at achieving more information freedom and more access to government’s activity and, therefore, at reducing opacity (Chapman & Hunt, 2006). Along time, and as a consequence of contributions from different fields, ¹ this first approach has been refined, giving rise to a definition related to enhancing transparency, collaboration, and participation by means of open data and open action. Gascó (2014) summarizes and operationalizes these dimensions stating that an open government is (see Table 1):

A transparent government, that is, a government that is accountable and that delivers information to citizens about its strategies, plans, and performance.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Open Government: Principles, Tools, and Related Concepts.

Transparency	Open data Open action	Information access Accountability Legitimacy and trust in government
Collaboration	Open data Open action	Interoperability Coproduction (Social) innovation
Participation	Open data Open action	Consultation and deliberation with citizens Participation in decision-making processes Participation in public policy design

Source. Gascó (2014).

During the last few years, public administrations around the world have embarked on open government initiatives and have worked to redefine their relationship with citizens and with each other. Some of them have even joined efforts and have taken part in networks such as the Open Government Partnership (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/), which was launched in 2011 to provide an international platform for domestic reformers committed to making their governments more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens.

However, the speed of events and the “need” to implement open government projects not to be left behind have given rise to confusion and ambiguity. Although many of the initiatives have been based on opening data and on promoting open action, generally speaking, governments have followed different directions and interpretations when it has come to implement them. As a result, nowadays, it can be said that the development of open government is unequal and heterogeneous. There is confusion about the concept itself (what an open government initiative is and what is not, difference with the e-government term, newness of the term, … ), about its implementation process, and about its real impact.

In the academic literature, openness has been approached from two different perspectives (Meijer, Curtin, & Hillebrandt, 2012), namely, transparency and participation. On one hand, the literature on transparency revolves around terms such as freedom of information, Internet, active dissemination of information, access to documents, and usability of websites (Curtin & Mendes, 2011). The core question tackled by these works is as follows: What is being made visible/transparent? Literature discusses, among other issues, the nature and scope of transparency, the usefulness of information, and the timing of the release of documents. The premise underlying these studies is that transparency yields to accountability. At the same time, a more accountable government is a more legitimate one (Sandóval-Almazán, 2011). Finally, legitimacy strengthens public trust in the government (Hazell & Worthy, 2010; Hood, 2011; Jaeger & Bertot, 2010). On the other hand, the literature on participation has analyzed issues such as interactive policy making, consultations, dialogue, and stakeholder involvement. The central question for participation is whose voice is heard? Empirical and theoretical analyses focus on inequalities in access to participation meetings (Meijer et al., 2012).

Although the link between transparency and participation may seem obvious, it has rarely been explored in the literature, which would have allowed for a more comprehensive understanding of openness and of the concept and implications of open government. Only recently, some works have started to tackle these issues, echoing what is happening in society and, therefore, focusing on the study of open government good practices, particularly in the field of open data.

Given this context, and taken into account both the practitioners and academicians’ needs, this special issue aims at shedding light on the open government concept and, in particular at:

Providing comprehensive knowledge of recent major developments of open government around the world.

The special issue includes eight articles. Karin Hansson, Kheira Belkacem, and Love Ekenberg, from Stockholm University in Sweden and the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, respectively, approach the open government concept from the notion of democracy. By analyzing the idea of democracy in peer-reviewed journals on open government from 2009 to 2013, they show how the three dimensions pinpointed by President Obama (transparency, collaboration, and democracy) relate to three core aspects of the democratic process, namely, understanding, deliberation, and representation.

The second contribution is by Taewoon Nam, assistant professor at Myongji University (Korea). Building on qualitative data from unstructured interviews with public managers and open government experts, the author analyzes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of open government efforts in Korea for open data, freedom of information, enhanced governance with citizens, and interorganizational collaboration. This article suggests that open government does not come easy and cheap and that, therefore, governments should consider more realistic, practical, and tangible approaches to achieving its ideals.

The third article, by Nicola Belle, Maria Cucciniello, Greta Nasi, and Giovanni Valotti, from Bocconi University in Italy, focuses on the open government dimension of transparency. After interviewing a sample of 500 Italian citizens on the type of information they consider most relevant, given the choice of institutional, political, financial, and service delivery-related information, the authors conclude that Italian provincial capitals currently fail to publish the information that citizens consider to be most relevant: service-delivery and financial data. The article is an important contribution for most of open government literature has mainly addressed the government perspective, not paying that much attention to what citizens think.

Transparency is also the main focus of Gunawong’s paper. The author, who belongs to the Faculty of Political Science and Public Administration at Chiang Mai University (Thailand), explores the use of social media in order to promote transparency by 172 Thailand public agencies. He concludes that there has not been a massive adoption of social media. What’s more, the few public agencies that use Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, it was observed that their Facebook pages were employed primarily for communicating general and public agency–related news, which does not result in transparency. As other works also show (Crump, 2011; Gascó & Fernández, 2013), although more information is usually perceived as more openness and transparency, social media is still mainly used as an extra channel for the delivery of messages, instead of as a means of empowering citizens.

Ines Mergel, associate professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University in the United States, aims at a different dimension: collaboration. The author describes the use by U.S. government agencies of open innovation approaches to invite citizens to crowdsource and peer produce solutions to public management problems. Her analysis shows that these approaches still are in its early stages and focus mostly on a wide range of crowdsourcing processes through which citizens are invited to generate and submit ideas to a government organization, oftentimes without a discrete public management problem to solve. Dr. Mergel’s contribution confirms that the collaboration dimension of open government needs further attention, from both the research and the hands-on perspectives.

This special issue closes with three different articles on open data, which shows the importance given to this type of initiatives when opening governments and, therefore, the interest that researchers manifest in this topic. The first one, by Iryna Susha, Anneke Zuiderwijk, Marijn Janssen, and Åke Grönlund, from the Department of Informatics of the School of Business of Örebro University in Sweden and the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, compare the various benchmarks for evaluating the progress of open data adoption that have recently emerged, analyzing the following criteria: key concepts, themes, metaphors, methodologies underlying the benchmarks, and theoretical assumptions at the foundation of the benchmarks. The authors find that each benchmark has its strengths and weaknesses and is applicable in specific situations but that, in any case, there exists an important gap in both the literature and benchmarks regarding the evolution of end-user practices and individual adoption of open data.

Carlos Carrasco and Xavier Sobrepere, from IESE Business School in Spain, analyze how well Spanish local governments are performing with regard to open government data initiatives. They use the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development framework for Open Government Data initiatives, which includes the following stages: strategy, implementation, organization, communication, interaction, and impact. Their analysis shows that Spanish municipalities can be divided into three groups according to their level of performance. The authors identify similarities and differences among such groups.

Finally, Dennis de Kool and Victor Bekkers, from Erasmus University Rotterdam, by using both surveys and interviews, investigate the perceived impact of open data provided by the Dutch Inspectorate of Education on the quality of education in Dutch primary schools. The results of their research show that both the factual use and the perceived usefulness of the Inspectorate’s open data are relatively low. Their contribution is key: Despite their contextual findings, this article aims at bringing some balance to the current literature situation, with many studies on open government focusing on the data published by governments (supply) instead of on the needs of potential users (demand).

Collectively, the contributions to this issue show that there is a long way ahead. Open government has just begun. I therefore thank the authors for their efforts and their insights into this important domain.