Open government data awareness: eliciting citizens’ requirements for application design

Abstract

Purpose Over the past decade, governments around the world have implemented open government data (OGD) policies to make their data publicly available, with collaboration and citizen engagement being one of the main goals. However, even though a lot of data is published, only a few citizens are aware of its existence and usefulness. The purpose of this paper is to identify the requirements for an application that raises awareness of Open Government Data (OGD) to citizens. Design/methodology/approach This study followed a design research science approach to collect citizens’ requirements for the design of such an application through interviews with 10 citizens and evaluated through user testing with 25 citizens. Findings This study identified and validated 11 requirements that can be implemented to raise citizens’ awareness of OGD. The most useful are listing OGD reuses with information about data used and receiving notification when a new OGD reuse is released. Furthermore, the evaluation results provided evidence of the effectiveness of using an application to improve OGD awareness to citizens. Originality/value This research provides requirements that can be used by developers to implement a usable tool to raise citizen awareness or by researchers to evaluate applications whose objective is to raise citizen awareness. Finally, it provides a mobile application that can used by developers to showcase their OGD reuses or by researchers to aware citizens of OGD through real-world examples.