Research

Open Government is not only changing politics and policies but is also redefining the notion of established research areas such as e-government and e-democracy.  The world of research – with the active participation of practitioners – needs to define an Open Government R&D agenda for the years to come.

In this post – just a note to myself – I list some interesting research topics classified into 4 main areas.

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and the US Open Government Directive of December 2009 profoundly changed the way governments of the whole world are conceiving the role of ICT in the Public Sector. Obama’s Directive, which directly (and almost immediately) influenced policy making in most OECD countries and also contributed to the growth of bottom-up initiatives, is now impacting the world of research.

Key questions such as the actual impact of open government data on citizens and enterprises remain largely unanswered. It is not just a matter of democratic principles and political messages, or transparency only. The diffusion of web 2.0 technologies and user-driven innovations in the public sector – along with the creation of new business opportunities coming from the re-use of government data by the private sector – is changing the perspective of interdisciplinary but actually quite separated research fields such as e-government (focused on the use of ICT in internal processes and in public services provision) and e-democracy (focused on citizen engagement through technologies such as on line polling and voting, deliberation, consultation). Teresa M. Harrison and her colleagues from the Center for Technology in Government (CTG) at the University of Albany SUNY made this clear in a paper published a few days ago: “Although e-democracy in political and e-government in administrative realms have historically been largely separated, it now appears Open Government brings these two spheres of activity together”. 
On the one hand, the provision of e-government services not only requires technical expertise but also, inevitably, implies political choices. On the other hand, e-government implementation should take advantage of the “power of the crowd” and the opportunities that come from involving the citizen and the private sector in new forms of public-private collaboration.

As boundaries between research domains are blurring, time has come to define an Open Government holistic framework and a global Open Government R&D agenda.

In Europe, the CROSSROAD project, a Support Action funded by the European Commission, has produced a Research Roadmap for “ICT for governance and policy modeling”, as defined by the objective 7.3 of the EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) 2009-2010. A white paper published in December 2010 and edited by Fenareti Lampathaki, Sotiris Koussouris, Yannis Charalabidis and Dimitris Askounis (National Technical University of Athens) identifies five main research themes and a three-level taxonomy. As the point of view is the broader concept of ICT for governance and policy making, a set of useful tools and research domains that are not usually considered in the current debate on Open Government are included here. This is the case of public opinion mining tools, which could be used to find out, for example, what types of citizens care about which type of government information. Another examples are the technologies that the EU classifies into the “Future Internet” studies, some of which (e.g. the Internet of Services) are based on government linked data availability.

In the US, the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) highlighted the importance of establishing an R&D agenda for open government in a report issued in December 2010. The Open Government Research & Development Summit was hosted on March 21-22nd, 2011 by the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program. The summit brought together government leaders and researchers to explore the needs of the community, and was organized by the office of the U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, while Beth Noveck – law professor at the New York Law School – was one of the prime movers on getting the meeting to happen.
Building on this first event, a workshop organized by the Center for Technology in Government (CTG) in Albany, New York on April 27-28th gathered a number of academics, practitioners and, moreover, hundreds of research questions still unanswered. These questions were then clustered into omogeneous groups such as “the value / ecosystem of Open Government”, “What do citizens want?”, “Government capabilities”, etc. As a second step, research questions were considered by four lenses: 1) law and policy, 2) management, 3) technology and 4) cross-cutting. Professor Ines Mergel reported on this in her blog: day one and day two. Furthermore, a full list of all the questions is now available in a CTG report prepared by Meghan Cook and M. Alexander Jurkat, which also include an interesting list of the biggest challenges faced in Open Government as perceived by the participants.

EU CROSSROAD project and US CTG workshop came up with quite similar research themes and questions, with CTG themes mainly comprised in the first section of CROSSROAD taxonomy “Open government Information and Intelligence for transparency”. Other CROSSROAD areas partially in common with the US approach are, for example, “Social computing, citizen engagement and inclusion” and “Identity management and trust in governance”.

In the following table I try to combine some of the most interesting aspects of the CROSSROAD and CTG exercises, that is a robust identification of research clusters and the use of “lens” corresponding to different disciplines.
Questions and themes are grouped together on the basis of data and information flows from government to citizens and back from citizens and businesses to government. With reference to the figure:

1. Open / linked data “supply side”: how to foster meaningful and useful government data publication? What implications / impact within the government agencies?
2. Open / linked data “demand side”: how to meet citizen and businesses needs? How to support data use and re-use?
3. Social computing: How to involve the citizen in collaboration projects / activities?
4. Citizen engagement: How to involve the citizen in democracy?
   For each combination of cluster / research theme vs. lens / research discipline I list some examples of questions and topics particularly interesting to me.

The first output of a web‐based survey shows that the European Cohesion Policy is only halfway to accomplishing a paradigm shift to open data, with differences in performance both between and ‐ in some cases ‐ within European Countries.
Low scores are attributed to the formats the authorities are choosing when publishing their data on the web, while other indicators such as the level of granularity are positively influenced by the requirements of current regulations.

Availability of Open Data on projects and beneficiaries of the European Cohesion Policy (or Regional Policy) – which is the second-biggest EU policy after agriculture with a budget of EUR 347 billion for the period 2007-13 – can surely help foster transparency in the use of public money in Europe.

The European Union lacks common initiatives such as the US Recovery.gov or USA spending.gov to track government spending and improve transparency of public policies. In particular, in the case of Structural Funds, there is no single point of access to the data, since each single EU Region and National agency acting as Managing Authority of the Funds is responsible for publishing data on the beneficiaries and the amount of public funding received.  This implies that hundreds of Managing Authorities are following different paths and implementing different information strategies when opening up their data. Many databases (often simple PDF lists) are now uploaded to regional or national institutional websites, showing huge variation not only in the way they can be accessed (formats, search masks, data visualization etc.) but also in content and quality of data provided (detail level, granularity, description, etc.).

Last summer, after a first analysis on the prevailing formats, I started to design an independent web-based survey on the overall quality of data published by each Managing Authority responsible for the 434 Operational Programmes approved in July 2009. Data was collected in October 2010 by me and Chiara Assunta Ricci, a brilliant PhD student in Economics at La Sapienza University of Rome. We were inspired by what people at the fantastic project Farmsubsidy.org had been able to do with the data from the other big EU policy, the Common Agricultural Policy. While their greatest achievement is having gathered the PDF documents every State has to publish on line in one real database, they also provide an evaluation of the lists of projects they have used by a transparency composite indicator. The same exercise could be applied to Structural Funds.

The first output of the survey was published a few days ago in the European Journal of ePractice. Here you can download the paper and here the full issue “The Openness of Government”. The paper is based on David Osimo’s seminal proposal for a “Benchmarking 2.0” and represents a pilot of a measurement framework for comparing governments’ efforts to make data available.

This exercise could represent a first step for improving current ‘traditional’ EU e-Government benchmarking. In fact, the new edition “Digitizing Public Services in Europe: Putting ambition into action – 9th Benchmark Measurement” (page 19 and 137) confirms the importance of updating and expanding the scope of the analysis by including new metrics on “Transparent and Open Government” .
The evaluation scheme is based on the Eight principles of Open Government Data, which are considered as a key reference and a worldwide de facto standard. This scheme is meant to be flexible and could be applied to other kinds of Government Data. Gianfranco Andriola, one of the promoters of the Italian Open Data Licence, helped me define the methodological approach for the principles “format” and “licence”. I must also thank the “man behind the curtain” of Spaghetti Open Data initiative, Matteo Brunati aka Dagoneye, for his suggestions about open formats, and Sergio Scicchitano for his many advices and support.

Results can be summarized as follows:

1. The European Cohesion Policy is only halfway to accomplishing a paradigm shift to open data, with differences in performance both between and – in some cases – within European countries. Best performing countries such as the Czech Republic and Finland obtain a score of 71%, while the worst performing Member State is Latvia with 25%. Countries from the eastern Europe often appear in the first half of the chart.
2. Very low scores are attributed to the formats the authorities are choosing when publishing their data on the web, while other indicators such as the level of granularity are positively influenced by the requirements of current regulations.
3. A considerable difference in performance is shown when comparing datasets that are shared and centralized at national level with those which are managed by a single regional authority. This variation is also statistically significant with regard to all the indicators examined, and is probably due to the fact that a centrally managed programme has the advantage that information flows are easier to manage and local actions are more easily coordinated.
4. The use of open, machine-processable and linked-data formats have unexpected advantages in terms of transparency and re-use of the data by the public and private sector. The application of these technical principles does not need extra budget or major changes in government organization and information management; nor does it require the update of existing software and infrastructures. What is needed today is the promotion among national and local authorities of the culture of transparency and the raising of awareness of the benefits that could derive from opening up existing data and information in a re-usable way.