Open government and data intermediaries

Abstract

Open Government initiatives can improve transparency, participation, and collaboration between citizens and government agencies. Increasingly a data intermediary is an important actor in this relationship. Helping state agencies as open data producers, and citizens as open data users, a data intermediary can improve the value of open data and achieve a better understanding between actors involved in an open data ecosystem. Using an extended version of the Technology Enactment Framework, this poster describes and analyzes the role of data intermediaries in the communication and collaboration processes taking place in open data initiatives in the public sector. Several organizational and institutional variables affecting the opening of government data as a socio-technical process are further identified.