Open Government and Governmental Open Data: What’s Behind This Policy Movement?

Open Government has become a popular term in discussion among policymakers at a global scale. The European Union states the term in its foundation Treaty, and President Obama signed the Open Government Directive on January 21, 2009, his first day in office (Meijer et al. 2012; Obama 2009). Open government is regularly associated with three principles of governmental activities, namely transparency, participation, and collaboration (Jaeger and Bertot 2010; Obama 2009).

To achieve these principles, and in particular the principle of transparency, governments around the world have recently revisited their information policies and implemented governmental OD efforts as information policy for greater governmental transparency (Jaeger and Bertot 2010). They make use of Internet-based technologies and facilitate access to governmental documents and machine-readable datasets, which were previously hidden from the public. For example, the European Commission has launched a European Open Data Portal (open-data.europe.eu) to create a single point of access to data of institutions and other bodies of the European Commission and its member states, which are free of use and reuse. In a similar vein, the US Federal Government offers Data.gov that provides access to a diverse set of machine-readable datasets that were previously not accessible.

The concept of transparency is not new in the scholarly discussion in political science and public administration. However, since 2008 it has been revitalized in the emerging discussion on Open Government and digitalization of governmental activities. Information technologies have changed the nature of how governments realize “transparency” (Brunswicker, Almirall, and Lee 2013; Medaglia 2012). Broadly speaking, information transparency can be described as the process of making information visible and inferable, and the degree to which information is visible and accessible (Bertot, Jaeger, and Grimes 2010). Thus, researchers and policymakers often use the term “open data” as a shorthand reference for the ability to “see” the activities of governmental agencies through the data that they generate and make available to the public. Scholars regularly consider transparency as a generative mechanism for deliberation, democracy, and thus, – often only implicitly – build upon principles of established democracy theories (e.g., Habermas’s theory of democracy) (Susha and Grönlund 2012).

To be generative for these deliberation and democracy effects, information transparency implies both a “technical” and “social/organizational” dimension (Jaeger and Bertot 2010). Over the last few years OD efforts have focused intensively on the technical dimension of transparency. For example, governmental agencies developed open data standards, open data metadata, open data interoperability, and took measures to create “linked” governmental data (Huijboom and van den Broek 2011; Fioretti 2011; Guijarro 2007). However, scholars point out that for true, citizen-centered transparency to be realized, participants must have an understanding of what that data means, and the ability to share that content and interact with others. Unfortunately, many issues like accessibility, usability of open data portals, and consideration of the social and interactive dimension of information search have not been resolved yet, and lack of participation of governmental agencies in open data programs remains a major barrier for open data efforts to be generative for democracy effects (Burnett, Jaeger, and Thompson 2008; Jaeger and Bertot 2010). In sum, a large proportion of the scholarly dialogue on open data policies is concerned with transparency as a central generative mechanism for deliberation and democracy and points out that governmental OD efforts may realize a new kind of citizen-centered transparency if the vision of governmental OD becomes reality (Meijer et al. 2012; Jaeger and Bertot 2010).

However, information transparency and democracy effects are not the only rationale for governmental OD efforts. Another reason for revealing OD to the public is economic in nature, and relates to the creation of an information market (Janssen 2011; Janssen, Charalabidis, and Zuiderwijk 2012; Chan and Pan 2008). The aim is to increase the amount of information available in order to inspire innovation, creation of applications and companies, and derive a greater value from the data that is being collected. Governments collect large amounts of data, and that data has value beyond the governmental context in which it was collected (Chan 2013). Releasing this data to the public allows businesses and individuals to access previously hidden data and create new products and services that can create value for both public and private interests. As a result, OD efforts have become relevant for innovation. For example, in the progress report on the US Open Government Initiative of June 11, 2011, the Executive Office of the President celebrates the Democratization of Government Data and the Data.gov platform launched in 2009 as leading a policy practice for innovation that is intended to be scaled across federal agencies (Chopra 2011). Thus, governmental OD efforts create a potential generative mechanism for transparency and at the same time may also act as source of a new mode of governmental innovation. With the release of governmental OD, innovations at the governmental level have received a new dimension of “openness,” which creates opportunities for innovations facilitated by governmental actors. Governmental agencies release data that are of public interest and hold some public properties but were previously not accessible by individual citizens and industry actors that were not in a contractual relationship with governments. This data has potential value for innovations that address societal problems or may motivate private and rent-seeking investors to turn this data in a novel product or service. This activity points out that “openness” of governmental activities is not just to do with democracy effects, deliberation, and inclusion. In a governmental context, “openness” and revealing (or disclosure) may also become a generative mechanism for innovation.

Revealing Mechanisms in a Governmental Open Innovation Context

Sharing and revealing of know-how and information to spur innovation are inherent characteristics of open innovation activities, which have predominantly been associated with firm-level innovation activities (Alexy et al. 2013; Henkel et al. 2014; Henkel 2006; Chesbrough 2003a; Chesbrough 2014; West and Bogers 2014). To understand the notion of revealing in a governmental innovation context and the particular nature of governmental OD revealing, we briefly review the concept of open innovation and nature of revealing in it. Open innovation describes an innovation process, in which firms purposively manage knowledge flows across organizational boundaries (Chesbrough and Bogers 2014). Following the logic of open innovation, the focal organizations need to transcend their boundaries and make use of external sources of innovation in order to respond to the increasing environmental uncertainty and complexity of the innovation problems they are exposed to (Felin and Zenger 2014; West and Bogers 2014). While the early discussion on open innovation conceptualized open innovation as a linear process, today scholars acknowledge that open innovation is interactive in nature and implies mutual inflows and outflows of knowledge (West and Bogers 2014; Henkel et al. 2014). In open innovation firms purposively manage these boundary spanning inflows (or inbound) and outflows (or outbound) of knowledge in order to appropriate value from them. There are different mechanisms for managing the “outflow” of knowledge and information. Some scholars argue that strong control over the intangible assets and legal ownership and immediate financial compensation for the outflow are essential in order to create and capture value from sharing intangible assets and innovation-related knowledge (Chesbrough 2003b, 2003a; West and Gallagher 2006). Examples range from biotech alliances, to contributions to standards (Simcoe, Graham, and Feldman 2009), or transactional relationships in technology markets (Arora, Fosfuri, and Gambardella 2001; Arora and Gambardella 2010), that are regularly offered by open innovation intermediaries (Howells 2006).

In some instances, innovators purposively waive control rights and reveal some innovation-related knowledge for free and without any contractual obligation for the receiver (Henkel et al. 2014; Alexy et al. 2013). This move is contrary to established “wisdom” and assumptions of theory and practice of strategy and innovation. Control over valuable knowledge has widely been considered as one of the most critical sources of competitive advantage and innovation (Teece, Pisano, and Shuen 1997). The phenomenon of revealing can be partly explained with the theory of private-collective innovation (Hippel and Krogh 2003; Alexy and Reitzig 2013) which describes a mode of value creation that lies between two opposing ends, the private-investment model on one end and the collective-action innovation model on the other. In the private-investment model, the innovator has control over the intellectual assets in order to secure the appropriation of innovation rents. In the collective-action innovation, the objective is to create “public goods” in which the innovative solution is non-exclusive and non-rival (Hippel and Krogh 2003). In the private-collective innovation, firms are willing to selectively contribute to the “collective” good as they may directly and indirectly benefit from it, for example, through the use of complementary assets resulting from the collective good or innovation learning from self-organizing communities (Alexy et al. 2013). In an open innovation mode, firms may very purposively and strategically make use of revealing to ensure that they derive direct and indirect benefits.

Open innovation literature furnishes two archetypes of “revealing” strategies at the firm level. There are two critical types of knowledge that innovating organizations usually try to “control,” namely problem-related knowledge, and solution-related knowledge (Hippel 1994; Felin and Zenger 2014; Alexy et al. 2013). Problem-related knowledge relates to market needs that the firm aims to address successfully. Solution-related knowledge relates to technological solutions that address these problems, and also knowledge to develop these solutions. As a result, we can distinguish two revealing strategies, namely problem revealing, and solution revealing. The open innovation literature has documented a wide adoption of problem revealing. For example, the large number of crowdsourcing studies document that firms engage in problem revealing (see Cordova, Dolci, and Gianfrate in this volume, Chapter 12). They furnish empirical evidence that problem revealing allows them to identify solutions of high novelty and helps them to overcome the problem of local search (Afuah and Tucci 2012). Firms engage in problem-related revealing to send signals to the external environment that they are unable to solve a particular technological problem on their own. This provides them with the opportunity to tap into the generative mechanism of “diversity” as the participation of a large public crowd increases the probability that they identify a novel “outlier” solution by technological and socially marginal problem solvers (Jeppesen and Lakhani 2010). Beyond that, problem revealing allows them to invite external actors to collude on existing technological paths they had started to developed internally but where multiple problems are not yet solved, and creates opportunities for detailing and expanding a technology path they have already invested in (Alexy et al. 2013). Thus, they can either spread a problem (or issue) to find novel solutions they would not identify internally, or make use of problem revealing to shape the agenda of innovators who learn about the problem. However, problem revealing is not confined to profit-seeking organizations only and has been adopted by governmental actors long before the governmental OD movement. In the eighteenth century, the British Government already spread the problem of “locating ships in the sea” when running the widely cited Longitudinal Prize mentioned above in the introduction (Afuah and Tucci 2012; OSTP 2013). In this case, the government directly benefited from a novel solution but also shaped the agenda for others that developed novel technological solutions for location identification.

Open innovation literature also provides empirical evidence of the adoption of solution revealing. For example, open source software companies disclose the source code to the general public, who can use and modify the code as they wish (Hippel and Krogh 2003). Solution revealing is also emerging in other non-ICT sectors. For example, pharmaceutical firms like Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline recently revealed some of their solution knowledge, their patents, for free usage and reuse in order to engage a larger community of researchers to solve a complex disease problem such as diabetes (Brunswicker and van de Vrande 2014). Solution revealing creates network externalities, enables the adoption of a new technology, and drives development of complementary solutions for a particular technology (Teece et al. 1997). Because of such benefits, solution revealing is also a relevant strategy pursued by governmental actors. For example, R&D grant policies and guidelines issued by governmental agencies increasingly make it mandatory to use creative commons or open source software licensing in order to increase the adoption and refinement of novel technological knowledge.

Against this background and the distinction of two revealing strategies, we observe that governmental OD represents a very particular form of revealing of innovation-related knowledge and information that contains public properties. Governmental data, such as data about crime rates, water quality, and other public matters, hold public properties and are of public interest. They furnish information that can turn into an innovative solution for a particular innovation problem. This data is regularly, though not always, released without the encumbrance of restrictive IPR that would confine their use to specific non-commercial solutions. In this case, OD represent public goods, which are non-rival, non-exclusive, and available to the society (Hippel and Krogh 2003; Ostrom 1990; Archibugi and Filippetti in this volume, Chapter 23). However, some countries have opted to restrict the use of their OD to the commons, believing that private returns to innovation are not well aligned with social returns (Dosi and Stiglitz 2014). Other countries have opted to allow private citizens and industry to develop solutions utilizing OD while maintaining IPR, and to extract rents from those solutions beyond contest awards. Many, including the United States, utilize multiple levels of rulemaking to adapt the IPR to best fit the local needs (Hess and Ostrom 2005) by allowing agencies to set their own policies with respect to the ownership of solutions that are created with their data.

In cases where governments release their data without restrictions on the IPR that govern their use, the revealing of governmental OD does not specify a particular problem that should be tackled by the public, nor does it preclude the innovator who makes use of this data to control the solution. Both private citizens and industry are able to appropriate the data for their own innovative uses and goals, and can freely choose to work alone or in concert with others to develop a solution. Revealing OD triggers innovation in a completely self-organizing way, following the idea of a collective innovation model (Alexy and Reitzig 2013; Ostrom 1990). OD are public goods, which may create potential societal benefits.

With the emergence of governmental OD as a revealing strategy of governments that should fuel innovations, we see that governments have taken measures to combine governmental OD with the two revealing strategies discussed above. In a sense, they move from a “collective-action” innovation model, toward a GOI model, in which they combine three revealing strategies. They selectively reveal data, problems, and solutions. They aim to turn innovation-related knowledge (though not in all cases) into a public non-rival good, but they also support some level of control over the intellectual asset. National governments and city authorities around the world have started to publicly release governmental innovation problems and invite a large number of citizens to find a solution for such problems (Almirall et al. 2014; Afuah and Tucci 2012). One of the most widely known “problem revealing” initiatives in the United States is Challenge.gov. The website publishes innovation problems that are of interest to the federal government, and regularly these problem statements explicitly point to the usage of governmental OD to develop an innovation solution. Thus, “problem revealing” goes hand in hand with governmental OD revealing. In some cases, governments allow innovators to maintain ownership over the solutions they create from OD. However, some governments also combine governmental OD with solution revealing when insisting on making the solutions developed by the innovator free of use (or reuse). For example, in Australia the governmental OD efforts are tied to a creative commons license, which limits the use of this data for solutions with tight control over technologies developed from OD (Jeppesen and Lakhani 2010). Table 24.1 summarizes the three revealing strategies available in a governmental innovation context.

Objectives of Governmental Open Innovation

Governmental OD furnishes a novel revealing strategy and creates a novel dimension of “openness” of governmental activities. OD efforts are potentially generative for democracy effects. At the same time, they create a new “information assets” that may spur self-organizing innovations. Since the emergence of the open data movement in 2008, we observe that governments combine governmental OD efforts with other revealing strategies, namely problem revealing and solution revealing. GOI may have multiple innovation objectives. They range from novel processes or policy solutions that make governments more efficient and cost-effective, toward new products and services that create value for a region, a state, a nation and increase its ecological, economic, and social welfare (Veit and Huntgeburth 2014; Almirall et al. 2014; Mergel and Desouza 2013). For example, OD innovations may help the society to manage our natural resources, like energy, in a more sustainable way by having better access to energy usage behavior through smart metering solutions (Chesbrough 2014). However, OD innovations may also result in new services that allow citizens to save costs on public administration and help them to better adhere to regulations and laws (such as mandatory inspections of vehicles, etc.), or a new visualization tool to learn about the best schools in a particular district. Thus, GOI may address incremental as well as more radical innovations that relate to new processes, products, and services.

Governance Modes of Governmental Open Innovation

There at least four stakeholder groups that are essential for GOI to flourish, namely (1) governments, (2) firms and start-ups, (3) universities and research organizations, and (4) the civic crowd. Depending on the objectives of the GOI activities, the relative importance of different actors may vary. However, in general GOI moves beyond the triple helix model and considers the citizens and the civic crowd as an essential actor in GOI (Almirall et al. 2014).

Open innovation literature discusses a range of governance modes to coordinate innovation among these stakeholders. They range from market-based transactions like licensing, alliances, innovation tournaments and contests, to self-organizing innovation communities (Felin and Zenger 2014). While the former are more suited to organize “designated” agents, the latter allow involving a large number of unknown innovation actors, including the civic crowd. In general, one can differentiate between two ways of organizing the external “crowd”: competitive contests, in which participants compete with each other, or collaborative communities (Boudreau and Lakhani 2013; Almirall et al. 2014). In GOI, the most widely used organizational forms are innovation contests (often referred to as challenges), in which they release a problem and motivate innovators via competitive contests and prize awards to develop novel solutions. They make use of rivalry as an incentive driving efforts and increasing the probability for novel solutions. Hackathons are a particular form of a one- to two-day innovation contest, in which governments invite software developers to a physical location in order to develop a solution in response to a revealed “problem.” Application developer contests are a virtual form of such hackathons, which invite developers to develop OD solutions and win a prize award independent from their physical location. While contests are the dominant mode of organizing GOI, some GOI activities are formed in a more collaborative manner, and allow the formation of OD communities that self-organize to respond to a particular governmental OD problem that is particularly complex. We also see forms of “collaborative” contests that address the overall ecosystem, and not just a particular subgroup of actors, to co-create OD innovations in a collaborative manner (Almirall et al. 2014; Afuah and Tucci 2012).

Europe

As an early adopter of the Open Data (OD) movement, the European Union currently boasts the largest number of OD portals of any region. The high density of countries, combined with an official encouragement to share public sector information (PSI Directive 2003), has created a vibrant area for governmental OD development to be compared between countries. Current OD efforts in the European Union are characterized by strong national efforts, and less mature umbrella programs, such as Open-Data.europa.eu and PublicData.eu, which seek to catalog data across governments. Several countries, including Ireland, Italy, France, and Spain, have also joined the Open Government Partnership (OGP), which is a worldwide multinational partnership dedicated to helping countries effectively create and release their data.

For our historical analysis, we focus on the United Kingdom and Denmark, which offer excellent examples of policy changes leading to new OD opportunities. Both countries implemented their OD policy in 2009, riding the first wave of global interest in making data more available to the public. Though they started at the same time, their stated objectives for releasing data were particular to the national context that they were developed in. Denmark pushed for “new services and insights” from open data (Danish Agency for Digitisation 2013) while the United Kingdom proposed “Putting the frontline first: smarter government” (Byrne 2009). The difference between these objectives may appear to be slight, but the ramifications of their vision were revealed throughout the development of their OD policy. Denmark placed a premium on digital solutions and “waves of digital self-service” which would allow citizens to use e-government sites and data on their own. In comparison, the United Kingdom viewed OD as a way to reduce disparities between the “frontline” of their government services and the “center” where decisions are made.

Both Denmark and the United Kingdom observed the need to encourage particular innovations using OD, and they choose different paths to achieve that goal. In Denmark, the launch of the Open Digital Innovation Strategy (ODIS) in 2013 created a Department of Digitalization to speed the transition toward recording all government activities in a digital form. Denmark also embraced OD contests at the onset of ODIS, and they are planning an annual contest (Smart Aarhus 2014). In the United Kingdom, a “non-departmental public body” called Innovate-UK was formed, under the guidance of the department for Business, Innovation and Skills, to promote OD and drive innovation through innovation contests. In both countries, there is a tendency toward governing the use of OD with large annual contests worth hundreds of thousands of kroner/pounds, in addition to small hackathons and other OD contests. Solutions developed from these contests are often released to the public once the contests conclude (Opening Up Government 2014).

The United Kingdom and Denmark place a premium on local and regional governance of data, tacitly recognizing that citizen participation is needed to identify problems with the current system, but rarely looking to individual citizens for solutions. Each government is also keenly aware of the impact that OD can have on industry, and action plans from Denmark’s Open Government Partnership affirm the strong interest of the Danish government in promoting innovation (Open Government Partnership 2013). In the United Kingdom, several contests are specifically targeted to help particular sectors, such as advanced materials (Innovate UK 2014b). Academia is often mentioned as a partner along with industry, however there are few examples where academia is specifically targeted, and fewer where they participate.

Finally, both the United Kingdom and Denmark conduct their OD in a widely distributed fashion common to most of the European Union. They offer powerful sites where they conduct OD contests, separate sites where they host data, and additional sites for departmental, national, and international repositories. Both also offer networking tools and events to bring participants together (Innovate UK 2014a), and conferences on OD have been held in both countries. There is no unified virtual space or forum where OD participants, industry, and academics can go to interact, nor is there a central collection of resources. These similarities, particularly in the large number of sites and lack of a centralized social infrastructure, echo the challenges that exist with OD in Europe: many cultures, many languages, and many problems that are embedded in their local context.

North America

Many nations mention the 2009 Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, which was signed by US President Barack Obama on his first day in office, as a point of inspiration for their own Open Government efforts. While many states and municipalities around the world had already embarked on a journey toward OD, this simple document and the subsequent Open Government Directive (Obama 2009) produced intense international attention to OD. The memorandum proposed three simple principles that government should follow: transparency, participation, and collaboration. The Open Government Directive that followed in December 2009 outlined a method to publish government information online, improve the quality of government information, create and institutionalize a culture of Open Government, and create an enabling policy framework for Open Government. The United States also became a founding member of the OGP in 2011, along with Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, and the United Kingdom (US Department of State 2014).

Mexico has rapidly adopted the OGP platform, becoming the first Latin American nation to chair the OGP, and launching their own National Digital Strategy in 2013 (Mexico 2014) that includes government transformation with OD. The desire for transparency is not a new issue in Mexico, which has had historical issues with state secrecy throughout the 71 years when the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) controlled politics in the country. In 2000, Vicente Fox ousted the PRI from the Presidency, gaining popular support with promises of transparency and accountability that would fight state corruption and secrecy (Vega 2012). In 2003, Mexico enacted their first federal Transparency and Freedom Act, which released government information to academics, journalists, and activists through a website. In many ways, this was one of the earliest digital Open Government efforts, but the implementation soon faltered, due to conflict between states and local governments and the federal government. In their latest Open Government efforts, special attention has been paid to this failure, and their strategy for open government has taken a more regional approach (Vega 2012).

In the United States, the creation of Data.gov ushered in a new era in data access for citizens. Starting with 47 datasets in 2009, a directive for each government agency to add at least two high-value datasets led to the platform amassing over 300,000 by the end of 2013. Data.gov has become a central repository for national, state, municipality, and some academic data. The migration to an open source platform, Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN), reduced the duplicates and errors, and currently hosts over 130,000 datasets from hundreds of government entities. On January 4, 2011 President Obama signed an expanded America Competes Act, which allowed agencies to fund prize competitions to spur innovation (US Department of Commerce 2014). The creation of Challenge.gov allowed agencies to expose their problems to the public and to govern the solutions through large prizes for innovative solutions. To date, there have been over $63 million in prizes awarded by over 60 agencies, which engaged 42,000 citizen solvers (Dorgelo 2014).

Mexico has also released a new OD transparency portal (Federal Institute for Access to Information and Data Protection 2014) that offers a variety of governmental datasets to the public. Though the number of datasets is currently rather small, the Mexican government has placed governing emphasis on local action through local civic innovation and hackathons. This local focus has been driven by Mexico’s history of OD failure, and a wellspring of civic-minded hackers who have helped change the technology landscape. In March 2013, the Mexican government had voted to spend 115 million pesos (9.3 million USD) for a mobile app for approximately 500 lawmakers to track their legislation. A group of civic hackers quickly created a competing app for 11,500 peso prize ($930 USD) (Codeando México 2013; Vega 2012). These hackers went on to work with the government to create a series of federal civic innovation offices, where they work with local policy experts and citizens to leverage technology and OD to solve civic problems.

Comparing the Open Government strategies between these two founding members of OGP reveals the national differences that drive adoption and use of OD. The United States and the Mexican government have both adopted a central repository for their OD, however the level of centralization is markedly different. In the United States, all federal programs are centralized on Data.gov, and a large number of states and municipalities have also uploaded their data there. This has led to criticisms of Data.gov as a dumping ground for data, where high-value datasets are lost amid the clutter of maps and GIS data that dominate the platform (Peled 2011). In Mexico, the central repository contains data that is purposefully selected due to its national importance, and regional data is incorporated into the Federal Innovation Offices.

In terms of participation, both the United States and Mexico refer to transparency, efficiency, and innovation as key benefits of citizen involvement in Open Government. Both countries also use contest awards and hackathons to encourage solution development, and those solutions are shared with the public, but implementation of contest outcomes appears to have more impact at the highest levels of government in Mexico. Industry participation with Governmental OD is also commonplace in both countries, with the United States listing dozens of companies working with Governmental data (US General Services Administration 2014), and Mexico has launched the Open Data 100 Mexico (2014) digital innovation team to identify and support companies working on their data. Academic participation is often mentioned as a key component of OD success, however academics currently play a small role in the governmental OD landscape. Both countries host OD conferences that attract academic participation, and both have datasets that have been supplied by institutions of higher education.

Again, we have found no unified virtual space or forum where OD participants, industry, and academics can go to interact, though there are many targeted communities and there is a central collection of resources. The differences between Mexico and the United States, particularly in the centralization of power and the diffusion of local innovation centers, highlight the challenges that face a large federal government and the innovativeness that can be gained by supporting local “hacktivisim.”

Australia

Following the recommendations of their Government 2.0 Taskforce, the Australian government adopted an Open Government Declaration in July 2010, citing transparency and innovation as key reasons to open up government data. The Open Government Declaration recognized the “economic, social, and environmental potential of releasing Government data,” and divided the effort into three key principles: informing through right to access, engaging to collaborate on policy, and participating to make government more consultative. In concert with these goals, the government launched Data.gov.au as a central repository for governmental OD (AGIMO 2014). The focus on innovation from governmental OD is in stride with previous countries that have been discussed above, however the emphasis on environmental impact is particularly poignant in a country that was home to the world’s first Green Party (Miragliotta 2012).

The Australian implementation of governmental OD has been touted as an invitation for citizens to innovate with OD, but there have been several setbacks on the journey toward this goal. In 2013, the Australian government acknowledged that 700 of their 1200 available datasets were just links to webpages or missing files (Sheridan 2013) and that there were very few users of this data. In 2014, the government bolstered the number of datasets by adding 2500 maps from the Department of Geoscience, and the repository contained over 5000 datasets at the end of the year. This growth has been hampered by a reticence on the part of territorial and local governments to share data (Hilvert 2013), and each territory continues to maintain its own OD site that is not searchable from the main Data.gov.au. Licensing of datasets is also an issue for Australian OD efforts, because two thirds of the data released by agencies is not licensed for open use (Hilvert 2013). Finally, data has been slowly released because it is difficult to convince agency leaders to spend money to prepare their data for consumption, leading to low participation among agencies.

While the state of Australian OD is in flux, the use of data to create innovative solutions is increasing rapidly. Utilizing a mixed cooperative and competitive hackathon approach, GovHack.org hosts a yearly competition that has grown from a small two-city event in 2012 to an 11-city event with 1300 participants in 2014 (GovHack.org 2014). Utilizing hackathons, Australians have developed a model for future civic innovation with governmental OD, which incorporates a diverse field of participants and supporters. GovHack organized federal agencies, state and territory governments, cities, and national and local corporate sponsors to support a hackathon for citizen participants. In keeping with the large geographic distance between cities, regions host their own local contests, and the winners of each contest go on to compete at the national level. Solutions generated by the most recent GovHack include an energy calculator for appliances, an interactive water quality map, and an online interactive portal for children to interact with OD called “Mash Academy.”

Participation in OD has been a challenge for Australia. There is a strong government mandate for OD with a creative commons license, yet participation has been disjointed, with territories and cities maintaining autonomy over the distribution of their data. One area of concern is citizen privacy with respect to the data released, and one Senator noted that “Having it fragmented is actually a defense against lack of security and privacy” (Timson 2014). Citizen participation in hackathons appears to be growing year on year, and the solutions generated are freely available for public use. Local and national industry partners are also increasing their support of annual hackathons, and the diversity of awards helps to ensure that industry partners see solutions relevant to their interests. Academic partnerships are surprisingly not mentioned on GovHack, however there is a strong Open Access movement in Australia, and future partnerships are planned (Picasso and Phelan 2014).

In keeping with the fragmented distribution of OD, we have found over a dozen smaller communities that concentrate on OD from their territory or city. GovHack maintains a hackerspace where participants can view projects and participate on a forum, but the focus is on the annual hackathon, rather than OD in general. Because of its dedication to GovHack, Australia stands out from many other OD initiatives by not offering a regular stream of highly financed contests throughout the year. Instead, they offer many small prizes in a variety of categories, attracting regular citizens to contribute their ideas and together to hack solutions from OD.

Asia

South Korea and Japan are two of the leading OD countries in the world, both in terms of maturity and capability, and their development has been well publicized in other outlets. Since the focus of this chapter is contrasting governmental OD developments, we have selected a different OD movement to reveal how OD can take root without overt government support. China offers an interesting insight into a technologically advanced country that has a long history of rigid data and communication standards, yet is slowly approving data for release to the public. Interestingly, the motivation to open this data comes as a response to the US and European OD movement, to capture China’s portion of the innovation, competition, and productivity gains (Yang 2013), rather than a call for governmental transparency and accountability.

Starting in 2011, the Shanghai Internal Data Directory became the first OD repository in China (Chao 2014), which was quickly followed by Beijing in 2012, and the National Bureau of Statistics in 2013. Though OD portals are few in number, the data released has been substantial, with an initial 425 datasets from Shanghai and over 4000 from Beijing. In 2013, there was a “hackathon-type” event on climate change, where the government released climate data for analysis (Chao 2013), though there is no information on prizes. Some OD is even considered controversial, and the Chinese government has requested that foreign embassies in Beijing stop releasing air quality data (Bradsher 2012). Recently, with a change to the environmental law by the Chinese Parliament, the Beijing Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs created a public app that uses factory emission data to enable non-government activist groups to identify and penalize factories that are exceeding the pollution standards (Carannante 2014).

Without a stated mandate to governmental OD, China has managed to adopt several of the same principles that guide participation and innovation in other national contexts. One of the largest barriers to OD resides in a government that has traditionally held information very close to the chest, and censored Internet and public speech are a staple of Chinese policy (Qiang 2008). Citizen reaction to this has been mixed, with several groups calling for more OD, however these requests are tempered with caution to operate within the guidelines of the state to avoid arrest or persecution (Chao 2013). Not to be denied, civic hacking groups have scraped government websites and the social networking platform Weibo to generate their own datasets for analysis. Additionally, outside efforts to delve into the hidden wealth of governmental data have been engaged in by Western media, but these activities may be too risky for Chinese citizens (Barboza 2012). Industry in China may have the most to gain from this tightly controlled data release, because there is growing governmental support for entrepreneurship and innovation with data. Academia also plays a significant role in Chinese OD, with Fudan University holding an international meeting on e-governance in 2013, with a number of sessions dedicated to OD.

Thus, organization of governmental OD in China is largely a collaborative effort in the hands of a community of civic hackers who are willing to find or ask for the data that they need to create apps. Contests remain rare, but the initial success may inspire the Chinese government to release additional data in the future. China may be on the threshold of a governmental OD revolution, if their civic hacking community can demonstrate the value of OD to a political body that is historically skeptical of the free release and public analysis of information.