Participation, Crowdsourcing, Co-Creation, and Innovation in Open Government Minitrack

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This minitrack focuses on the interactions between citizens and governments. As e-Government becomes more ubiquitous, many questions arise about what it means to develop and maintain an open and transparent government, engage in participatory government, encourage governance through transparency initiatives, support co-design of open and collaborative government, allow data ("Big Data") release and use for policy- and decision-making, develop open data and open-data applications, and study how governments/governmental institutions might be influenced through openness and transparency efforts. This minitrack includes research on and studies of involvement of the public in the development, use, and evaluation of e-Government and participatory government dynamics, initiatives, and systems, including research that develops and explores open and transparent government frameworks, theories, evaluation, practice.

Open government is an approach which purposefully emphasizes and re-invigorates the basic principle of a "government of the people, for the people, and by the people." Through information technology, committed administrative leadership, international initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership, and policies, countries around the world have now entered an era of unprecedented transparency of government operations and decision-making intended to lead to more responsibility, accountability, collaborative and participatory government, and integrity of public officials. Additionally, involvement of citizens in the iterative design and evaluation of e-Government systems leads to more effective digital tools for civic engagement and participation in the long run.

We welcome theoretical papers as well as quantitative and qualitative studies on the topics. Good case studies will also be accepted with strong implications for theory and practice. topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Theories, quantitative and qualitative studies on open government
  • Open/transparent government initiatives around the world
  • Open data in government and applications built on open data
  • Technologies enabling/inhibiting open/transparent government
  • Crowdsourcing in government
  • Collaborative design and participation by citizens
  • E-Citizen, e-Democracy and e-Participation
  • Participation and deliberation
  • Innovation through open data and government
  • Freedom of information and transparency
  • Studies of citizens and democratic processes in social media and/or virtual worlds
  • Impact on society, communities, companies and government
  • Good practices and pitfalls in open government, public engagement, collaboration
  • Technology-based approaches to making government information available
  • Studies of the universal access requirements of e-Government
  • Impact of policy on transparency and openness
  • Methods, practices, and approaches to assess the success of open government efforts
  • Privacy, security, and the right to know

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Mitch Cochran (Primary Contact)
City of Monrovia
Email: mcochran@ci.monrovia.ca.us

John Carlo Bertot
University of Maryland
Email: jbertot@umd.edu

Scott P. Robertson
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Email: scottpr@hawaii.edu

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Shedding Light on Participation in Open Government Arenas: Determinants of Platform Activity of Web and App Users
    (2017-01-04) Schmidthuber, Lisa; Hilgers, Dennis; Gegenhuber, Thomas
    This article develops and tests a model to explain web-based and mobile devices usage by citizens to interact with their local government. By employing literature from diverse fields of information systems research, the authors derive an integrated model that investigates citizen participation on a city improvement platform. The model proposes three overall influences on platform activity: technological influences (perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness), motivational influences (intrinsic motivation and prosocial motivation), and socio-demographic influences (gender, age, education), and is tested among two groups of users (i.e. web page and mobile app users). Empirical results show that platform activity of both web and mobile users is mainly driven by intrinsic and prosocial motivation. Whereas perceived usefulness is positively associated with platform behavior of web users, TAM variables have not effect on mobile users’ activity. While gender and age play a role regarding web activity, age and education influence mobile participation.
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    Crowdsourcing Design: A Synthesis of Literatures
    (2017-01-04) Liu, Helen K.
    Crowdsourcing is a phenomenon emerging in various sectors and industries that provides an opportunity for governments to collaborate with the public to generate information, deliver public services, or facilitate policy innovation. This review paper synthesizes prior research and practices on crowdsourcing from a variety of disciplines and focuses on the purpose, crowd, motivation, process design and outcomes. A process map for governments to design crowdsourcing is generated and three key actions are highlighted, namely incentive design, communication, and information aggregation.
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    Citizen Participation and Transparency in Local Government: Do Participation Channels and Policy Making Phases Matter?
    (2017-01-04) Kim, Soonhee; Lee, Jooho
    The purpose of this study was to analyze the relationship between citizen engagement in various public participation programs and the participants’ assessment of transparency in local government. To examine this relationship, the study focused on three aspects of citizen participation: (1) citizen engagement in participation programs generally, (2) online versus offline participation, and (3) online or offline participation in policymaking phases specifically. A 2009 survey of residents of Seoul, South Korea, was used to test the study hypotheses, as it provided information from 1,014 respondents on their citizen participation and their perceptions of transparency in government. Surprisingly, citizens’ engagement in public participation programs was not significantly associated with perceptions of transparency in government. Moreover, citizen participation in online programs had a marginally negative association with assessments of government transparency. However, citizens who engaged in offline participation programs during the policy agenda setting phase indicated a more favorable assessment of transparency in local government.
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    Introduction to Participation, Crowdsourcing, Co-Creation, and Innovation in Open Government Minitrack
    (2017-01-04) Cochran, Mitch; Bertot, John Carlo; Robertson, Scott