Open data and its usability: an empirical view from the Citizen’s perspective

Vishanth Weerakkody*, Zahir Irani, Kawal Kapoor, Uthayasankar Sivarajah, Yogesh K. Dwivedi

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Government legislation and calls for greater levels of oversight and transparency are leading public bodies to publish their raw datasets online. Policy makers and elected officials anticipate that the accessibility of open data through online Government portals for citizens will enable public engagement in policy making through increased levels of fact based content elicited from open data. The usability and benefits of such open data are being argued as contributing positively towards public sector reforms, which are under extreme pressures driven by extended periods of austerity. However, there is very limited scholarly studies that have attempted to empirically evaluate the performance of government open data websites and the acceptance and use of these data from a citizen perspective. Given this research void, an adjusted diffusion of innovation model based on Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory (DOI) is proposed and used in this paper to empirically determine the predictors influencing the use of public sector open data. A good understanding of these predictors affecting the acceptance and use of open data will likely assist policy makers and public administrations in determining the policy instruments that can increase the acceptance and use of open data through an active promotion campaign to engage-contribute-use.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)285-300
Number of pages16
JournalInformation Systems Frontiers
Volume19
Issue number2
Early online date23 Jul 2016
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Apr 2017

Bibliographical note

© The Author(s) 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Keywords

  • Citizens
  • Government
  • Open data
  • Policy
  • Usability

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