Whose open data is it anyway? An exploratory study of open government data relevance and implications for democratic inclusion

Kayla Schwoerer

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Abstract

Open government data (OGD) is believed to enhance democratic outcomes by empowering citizens with the information necessary to participate in meaningful ways. Nonetheless, questions remain about whether OGD is indeed empowering citizens to participate or if the data that governments publish is more reflective of the interests of non-citizen stakeholders. Using the metadata of 2607 publicly available datasets scraped from New York City’s open data portal, this exploratory study employs qualitative content analysis to identify what types of data are published and what the data say about OGD’s potential as a tool for advancing inclusion in democratic processes. The analysis focused particularly on the datasets’ relevance to five particular stakeholder groups: citizens, private sector firms, nonprofits, researchers, and the city’s internal agencies. Findings showed that non-citizen-relevant datasets not only outnumbered citizen-relevant datasets by a large margin but they were also viewed and downloaded at higher rates too. I discuss the implications for inclusion in democratic processes, including power imbalances among OGD user groups, the discretionary power data publishers possess, and, ultimately, whether the types of data cities publish is sufficient for empowering an informed citizenry, as an effective democracy demands.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)491-515
Number of pages25
JournalInformation Polity
Volume27
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Dec 2022

Funding

The author is grateful for the funding provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF SCC Grant 1952096) which partially supported this research. The author is grateful for the funding provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF SCC Grant 1952096) which partially supported this research. She also wishes to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and suggestions for improving this paper.

FundersFunder number
NSF SCC
National Science Foundation1952096

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