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Digital citizen empowerment: A systematic literature review of theories and
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DOI: 10.1080/02681102.2022.2046533

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Digital citizen empowerment: A systematic
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Swapnil Sharma, Arpan K. Kar, M. P. Gupta, Yogesh K. Dwivedi & Marijn
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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR DEVELOPMENT
https://doi.org/10.1080/02681102.2022.2046533

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Digital citizen empowerment: A systematic literature review of
theories and development models
Swapnil Sharma
Marijn Janssen

a

, Arpan K. Kar

a

, M. P. Guptaa, Yogesh K. Dwivedi

b

and

c

a

Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India; bSwansea University,
Swansea, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; cTechnische Universiteit Delft, Delft, Netherlands
ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

Governments worldwide invest heavily in digital initiatives to develop
information societies with connected and actively engaged citizens, but
problems like lacking sustained engagement and quality of
participation still plague them. We undertook a systematised literature
review on the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases, covering
dispersed literature surrounding Digital Citizen Empowerment (DCE)
from the past two decades.Categorising the literature under four
thematic categories or strategies of DCE: Digital Activism (DA), Multichannel Service Delivery (MCSD), Participatory Budgeting (PB), and
Deliberative Governance (DG) critical comparative analysis is done. A
conceptual model of DCE, covering how theories from different interdisciplinary areas of political, social, and information science influence
the development of information societies and DCE is presented. Action
points in our conceptual model are mapped to policy objectives
targeting improved delivery of empowering policy goals by
practitioners, and future research opportunities in the context of DCE
are discussed.

Digital empowerment; eGovernance; digital society;
digital activism; citizen
empowerment

1. Introduction
After the 2000s, the world shifted from New Public Management (NPM) towards ‘digital-era governance’ (DEG), focusing on reintegrating and transformative digital changes in administrative infrastructure to provide holistic services to citizens (Margetts & Dunleavy, 2013). These fundamentals
are seen as key drivers in different initiatives worldwide, which help facilitate state–citizen interactions over digital media (Navarra & Cornford, 2012; Touchton & Wampler, 2014). In their latest
e-government survey, the UN has noted that 65% of the 130 nations are at a high or very high
level of the E-Government Development Index (EGDI) (United Nations, 2020). The three-level
process of information dissemination, feedback and consultation, and collaborative decisionmaking using the internet aims to change the state of citizens from passive to active, improving
the democratic process and overall governance (Naranjo-Zolotov et al., 2019).
Empowered citizens form the backbone of a well-functioning democracy (Sørensen, 1997). For
some time, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been accepted and promoted
by governments and civil society organizations (CSOs) as being instrumental in empowering their
citizens by improving their capabilities and the control they have over their own lives (Chohan &
CONTACT Swapnil Sharma
swapnil.sharma2007@gmail.com
C/O Swapnil Sharma, 4th floor, Department of Management Studies, Vishwakarma Bhawan, IIT-Delhi, Hauz Khas, New-Delhi-11016
Nancy Pouloudi is the accepting editor for this manuscript.
© 2022 Commonwealth Secretariat

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S. SHARMA ET AL.

Hu, 2020a; Stone & Can, 2021). Empowerment as a concept is related to the word ‘power’, i.e. the
ability and permission to achieve a specific goal. Also, the term ‘to be empowered’ relates to both
a process and an outcome – to the effort to obtain a relative degree of ability to influence the
world (Staples, 1990). In this context, Digital Citizen Empowerment (DCE) is not only about providing
basic access to information and services, but is about achieving human capital improvement, transforming citizens from general users into empowered individuals who can act as problem identifiers
and civic solution innovators, contributing back to the ecosystem within which they thrive (Pirannejad & Janssen, 2017). This process of using ICT for governance and reaching the marginalized social
classes is a leveller for the digital divide experienced in developing countries (James, 2020; Simons
et al., 2020). Internet and its usage for political participation are seen as an equalizer for the power
imbalance in communities (Sasaki, 2017). Digital services for governance and the facilitation of
openly available government data are promoters of involving and collaborative politics at the
local and global levels (Meng et al., 2019; Tianru, 2020). Lately, online platforms have become
highly involved and integrated with the realization of public values. Research establishes a need
for joint responsibility between governments and citizens to actualize development policy objectives (Helberger et al., 2018). The context of DCE also becomes increasingly important as the
modern youth spends a significant time socializing online, and digital platforms have become a prominent space of political discourse for them (Literat et al., 2018). Scholars note a shift towards a
citizen-centric capability development approach for designing and managing initiatives in the
area of developing human capabilities and delivering development and empowerment goals.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) sees citizen empowerment as a necessary condition for enhancing the quality of service delivery, establishing the credibility of government decisions, and supporting the legitimacy of governance in any country
(OECD, 2001). Across the globe, we are witnessing the advent of smart cities and the development
of digitally connected ecosystems with dis-intermediated, citizen–state interaction to solve social
and administrative issues at local and national levels (Kar et al., 2019). Researchers have long
believed in the potential of using engaging and empowering processes as a remedy for the problems of any democratic system, such as corruption, elite capture, and discrimination, among
others. Multiple studies show a changing pattern in the strategies, theories, and frameworks that
drive the DG initiatives aimed at DCE. Through our study, we are trying to understand how governments worldwide are building up their infrastructure and human capacity to develop these future
information societies. We have attempted to present specific action and policy points for practitioners and researchers based on the theoretical underpinnings of the concept of DCE. The aim
is to provide theoretical support for the phased development of information societies and the
human capacity of people living in them. We will focus on exploring the literature for theories
and models for achieving DCE. Our motivation stems from the fact that the literature notes that
most information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) initiatives fail
because of their inability to deliver power to the hands of the people. Ensuring citizens’ sustained
voluntary participation as not mere consumers but co-creators and prosumers of these initiatives
is crucial to deliver local and national social development goals. For these reasons, we aim to
answer two research questions at the end of this review:
(1) What are the different citizen–state interaction models through which governments are trying to
achieve citizen empowerment using ICT?
(2) What are the main supporting and obstructing factors that affect the development of a knowledge society as targeted in digital transformation initiatives by governments?
The remaining sections of the manuscript have been organized as follows: section 2 covers the
background literature on the concept of empowerment; section 3 covers the selection of literature
for review in this study; section 4 covers the analysis of selected literature; section 5 covers the
findings of our in-depth review of literature based on identified themes and summarizes them

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3

comparatively; section 6 has the theoretical discussion on ICT-based empowerment covered in the
selected literature. Sections 7 and 8 cover contributions to theory and practical implications. Section
9 concludes the study by summarizing the main insights, and section 10 presents the limitations in
our research and the problems we could identify for future explorations.

2. Background
2.1 Empowerment Theory
Empowerment has been a recurring theme among researchers of social and political sciences for five
decades. It has been discussed in different contexts and related to various subjects or levels of
enquiry chosen by them. Empowerment has been defined and studied as ethnocentric initiatives
of social work for working with minority groups and the marginalized (Guitierrez & Ortega, 1991;
Solomon, 1987); as a conservative-liberal approach to improve welfare services by mediating
social institutions for improving the lives of weaker citizens in a community as a social unit
(Berger & Neuhaus, 1996); and as a socialist approach for dealing with demands of equality and
social responsibility in the context of social problems (Boyte & Evans, 1984). Empowerment can
shape a person’s character and the level of influence or degree of control they can assert over
their life and their socio-political context as an actor (Gruber & Trickett, 1987; Pinderhughes,
1983). It is an interactive process between a person and the socio-political environment leading
to external and internal change, where citizens develop their skills, abilities, and experience to
drive societal change (Kieffer, 1984; Parsons, 1991).
Zimmerman defined an individual’s empowerment as an active psychological process in the
environment of a democratic setup (Zimmerman & Rappaport, 1988; Zimmerman, 1995, 2000).
This process helps integrate self-acceptance and confidence, socio-political understanding, and an
ability to play a significant part in decision-making and controlling resources. Zimmerman’s framework is used extensively in the literature to understand and improve healthcare goals (Chandola
et al., 2004; Goodman et al., 2004), to understand youth participation (Rodrigues et al., 2018), or
other socio-political issues dealing with power imbalance among the players in any context. The
process of empowerment is also defined as an active and iterative one, formed by the circumstances
and the events (Cattaneo & Chapman, 2010). At its core is human endeavor attempting to shift from
a passive state to an active one based on the ideas of participation and engagement (Altermark &
Nilsson, 2018). This becomes even more critical as empowered citizens can contribute back to
their communities and nations using their digital participation skills (Kar et al., 2019).

2.2 Ict and citizen empowerment
ICT4D literature has a clear divide based on two streams of thought and theory (Sein et al., 2019)
regarding the relationship between ICT use and citizen empowerment. Some scholars doubt the
potential of ICT in citizen engagement, stating that digital initiatives can potentially lead to exclusion
and the reinforcement of social barriers (Fraunholz & Unnithan, 2009; Mariën & Prodnik, 2014). Scholars also warn that the data revolution in governance might further widen the digital divide as it
builds upon pre-existing social differences (Cinnamon, 2020) and strengthens participation barriers
(Krishna, 2021). In contrast, the other group believes in the potential of ICT to develop better knowledge networks in societies that can help the marginalized voice their opinions and have better
control over their fate in a digital social setup (Brinkerhoff & Wetterberg, 2016; Treré, 2016). Blakeley
(2010) presents this divide through the perspective of governmentality and defines two paradoxes:
first, the presence of multiple stakeholders doesn’t necessarily dilute the State’s power, and; second,
the breadth of available participatory practices doesn’t ensure citizen participation. Other scholars,
like Boulding and Wampler (2010), employed the perspective of Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach
(Sen, 1999) and suggested that citizen empowerment positively facilitates the expansion of the

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S. SHARMA ET AL.

public sphere. This can allow citizens to exercise rights and forge bonds of solidarity with other citizens. Pandey and Gupta (2018) tried to establish and validate the relationship between ICT and
developmental initiatives taken by governments employing a comprehensive evaluation framework
focusing on different types of impacts created by such initiatives.
Recently, scholars have explored the possibility of DCE by changing the pre-existing power
relations in the society with the help of strategically aligned public-value delivery using ICT (Mali
& Gil-Garcia, 2017; Li et al., 2020). Scholars suggest that ICTs based value co-creation in e-governance,
improvement in overall quality of service, feeling of accountability, and openness can improve citizens’ trust and adoption of digital participation mechanisms (Chohan & Hu, 2020b; Hu et al., 2019).
However, DCE can be sustainable only if initiatives can achieve long-term ICT engagement with the
citizens. In some cases, short-term engagement could also improve citizens’ feeling of empowerment if their interests are accounted for with immediate gratification in the form of incentives
and feedback (De Mesquita et al., 2018; Gün et al., 2020; Mohamudally & Armoogum, 2019). The
relationship between sustainable development goals (SDGs) given by the UN and the usage of
ICT to achieve them is also explored in the literature. Researchers call for a conscious effort by
policy practitioners and designers employing the idea of policy-coherent sustainable development
(PCSD) (Rothe, 2020; Sánchez-Tortolero et al., 2019). We find a new conceptualization of the ICT4D
field with contemporary issues, discussing ways to improve citizen e-participation in governance
(Heeks, 2020b, 2020a). The growing role of social media in organizing collective action and participatory monitoring for evaluating local initiatives can help make DCE socially sustainable and more
effective (Cieslik et al., 2021; Kibukho, 2021; Ye et al., 2021). Across all these deliberations in the
research body, it is also established that governments cannot achieve sustainable DCE without
improving individual capabilities. Only this can promote the feeling of voluntary participation and
ownership over initiatives to tackle local issues (Hoque, 2020; Vaidya & Myers, 2021; van Biljon,
2020), and this forms our core motivation for taking up this study.

3. Selection of literature
To study the evolution of DCE literature, we chose the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases.
These are two of the most extensive repositories for research literature, allowing users to search and
filter papers covering different fields of study. This is particularly useful as we expect the concerned
literature for our review will be touching many areas of research and application. As a methodology,
we followed the systematic literature review process as depicted in Figure 1 (Chauhan et al., 2016;
Gupta et al., 2018; Kapoor et al., 2014; Williams et al., 2015).
A keyword search was conducted on these databases using three keywords: ‘Digital Citizen
Empowerment’, ‘Digital Empowerment’ and ‘Citizen Empowerment’ with OR operator in ‘Articletitle, keywords or Abstracts’ field, which resulted in a total of 656 results. De-duplication was
done before moving ahead, which left us with 520 unique articles. To ensure a better quality of
peer-reviewed literature, the studies were restricted to journal articles, resulting in 302 documents.
In the next phase, fields of study were restricted only to ‘Social-studies, Computer Science or Management’ to keep the search relevant to the context of this study, leaving 210 documents to cover.
Based on the reading of abstracts, we shortlisted 114 articles for in-depth reading. All this filtering
was done by 15th April 2021. After reading these filtered papers in depth, we selected 72 documents
for the review (the complete list of selected studies is available in the Appendix).

4. Literature analysis
The search resulted in a pool of literature distributed over two decades, of which more than 50% has
been published in the last five years. The studies overlapped with a few other research fields, namely:
Computer Science; Arts and Humanities; Business, Management, and Accounting; Economics,

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR DEVELOPMENT

5

Figure 1. Stepwise selection process.

Econometrics and Finance; Environmental Science; Earth and Planetary Sciences; Engineering; Psychology; Energy; Mathematics; and Medicine, which is indicative of interdisciplinary research work
(Figure 2).
Spain and the USA were leading nations of the authors in this area of research, with 37 articles
each, followed by the UK with 21. Only three articles were found to be from India. The literature
is mainly applied research and is based on cases from around the world. At the same time, some
papers solely focus on the theoretical discussion around the concept of empowerment or a combination of both applied and theoretical research. In total, we identified 15 entirely theoretical papers,
22 descriptive case studies, 29 case studies that had a rich theoretical contribution, and 22 studies
with an empirical method to support their findings (Figure 3).
Almost all the studies are related to the socio-political empowerment of the citizens of a region/
state/country. The prominently discussed theme was engaging citizens through different types of
government initiatives. Most of the literature revolves around top-down initiatives started by the
governments and adopted by citizens. However, eight studies focus on bottom-up initiatives
started by citizen activists, and one piece focused on the opinion of administrators or service providers on initiatives of citizen empowerment.
We uncovered four significant themes of literature based on different streams observed in
selected corpus and internal discussion among the authors. These themes correspond to the

Figure 2. Distribution of selected articles.

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Figure 3. Distribution of literature on methodology.

different types of strategies adopted by national, state, or municipal governments to improve citizen
voice and participation in designing and deploying policy initiatives for e-governance:
(1) Multi-channel Service Delivery for e-governance (MCSD) (Bay-Meyer, 2013) for a more servicedelivery-oriented e-governance;
(2) Participatory Budgeting (PB), a tool of civic engagement that allows citizens to participate in
budgetary decision-making processes (Boulding & Wampler, 2010) with a focus towards
financial inclusion;
(3) Deliberative Governance (DG), a form of governance where every policy decision is based on
deliberations with the citizenry and adopts both the elements of consensus decision-making
and majority rule (Park et al., 2017);
(4) Digital Activism (DA), the most citizen-inclusive approach that incorporates feedback and diversity in priorities even through online platforms (Bucy & Gregson, 2001).
These themes are identifiable from the case studies covered in the selected corpus of papers, and
a detailed discussion of them is covered in the following sections (Figure 4).
A keyword association map was generated using the VOSviewer software (van Eck & Waltman,
2010), short for visualization on similarities. This allowed us to check the consistency of the selected
corpus with our research goals. We used a Scopus data file in RIS format containing authors, title,
journal, publication year, keywords, affiliations, and references (Figure 5).
Since the area we chose to study intersected with multiple other areas of study, we chose another
classification to study the distribution of literature selected in our study given by Barki et al. (1988). It
lists out 1,100 keywords in nine top-level categories: Reference disciplines, including External
environment; Technological environment; Organizational environment; Information Systems (IS);
IS management; IS development & operations; IS usage; and IS education & research on the Information Systems area. The purpose of choosing this classification theme was to lay out the distribution of the selected studies into subclasses of the Information Systems area to observe
different points of focus or enquiry in the chosen corpus of our research (Figure 6).
We saw that most of the studies fell into the reference discipline category. This can be explained,
as we designed our search filters to focus on articles in the area of social sciences. This is because the
context of our search was around the use of ICT in governance, while the second category was IS
management.

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Figure 4. Major themes in the literature.

Figure 5. Keyword association map of the selected literature.

5. Findings of review based on major themes from literature
This section explores the four major themes identified to study the interaction of different stakeholders in a democratic setup for delivering DCE. We have also attempted to identify the significant
supportive or obstructing factors for each of these themes. The objective was to uncover the contextual relationship between the different stakeholders.

5.1 Multi-Channel service delivery for e-governance
The use of ICT and digital strategies by democratic actors (governments, elected officials, media, political organizations, citizens/voters) for political and governance processes of local communities,
nations, and the international stage has been termed as e-democracy. E-government is a subset
of this setup and pertains to provisioning services, information, and e-participation of the public

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Figure 6. Distribution of studies based on keyword classification.

(Riley, 2003; Vyas-Doorgapersad, 2009). It refers to the processes and structures that encompass all
forms of electronic interaction between the government (elected) and the citizen (electorate). Information and knowledge sharing are essentials in its functioning, which can bring about change in the
form of the citizenry from passive to active. Norris (2003) supports that the growth of e-governance
can modernize and deepen democracy in countries or constituencies where the public has become
disenchanted with the traditional channels of participation in representative democracy. ICTs in governance could be used to solve problems like corruption, poor information access, lack of transparency and accountability, high cost to citizens for access to services, and a lack of quality service
delivery (Agrawal et al., 2007). Automation, informatisation, and transformation can help solve all
the problems listed above in a democratic structure.
In contrast, Riley (2003) also argued that there is a move towards ‘surveillance societies’, which
endangers the fundamental principles of democracy. May and Chadwick (2003) argued that e-governance leads to reinforced managerialism in the public sector rather than facilitating public consultation and participation. It may seem like a cost-effective option to deliver good governance, but it
may work adversely in developing democracies due to a lack of infrastructure and education (Fraunholz & Unnithan, 2009; Kariuki & Tshandu, 2014; Mariën & Prodnik, 2014). After analysing the literature in depth, it can be summarized that the idea of e-governance has great potential for
empowerment. However, it can still fail to deliver if the commitment of governments and citizens’
ability or motivation to act are lacking. This is of particular importance as in democratic setups,
empowering processes are driven from both government and citizens.
The literature in this focus area outlines the following factors to ensure the success of state
machinery for service delivery: first, development of a robust and transparent governance infrastructure for information sharing and service delivery with universal access; second, developing platforms
as services to deliver governance to all in a transparent manner; third, minimizing offline state–
citizen interaction to avoid opportunities for corruption; fourth, regular audits and public-feedback
opportunities to maintain the quality of services delivered; and fifth, maintaining accountability
through policy design to ensure service delivery and sustainability (Bhatnagar, 2002; Brinkerhoff &
Wetterberg, 2016; Shelley et al., 2004; Svärd, 2017).

5.2 Participatory Budgeting
PB is the process of involving citizens in decision-making for budget allocations in a constituency,
with the hope that the involvement of low-income or marginalized groups in budget allocations
can help improve their quality of life (World Bank, 2008). It is also influenced by Sen’s Capability
Model for citizen empowerment, assisting citizens in exercising their rights and making collaborative
bonds with others to expand their own sphere of influence (Sen, 1999).
This type of active citizenry helps keep the government officials and service providers in check
while distributing and delivering resources to ensure efficiency and minimal leakage (Boulding &

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR DEVELOPMENT

9

Wampler, 2010). PB was developed and implemented first in Brazil, and it has found worldwide
acceptance. It has helped deliver positive or mixed results in many democracies worldwide, like in
Italy, Spain, Korea, and China. PB in the literature is seen to operate on three basic principles or
logics of administrative strengthening. First, the administrative logic of introducing active citizens
in governance; second, the political-reforms logic that can help strengthen citizen politics and community mobilization; and third, the empowerment logic of moving the power balance in favor of citizens in a state–subject relationship (Baogang, 2011).
The literature is unanimous on two caveats towards achieving empowerment goals: the government’s control over people’s participation in the decision-making process, and local government
officials’ resistance. They contribute this condition to the debate of expert knowledge vs. popular
mandate (Ganuza et al., 2016), leading to a divide between the opinions of the governed and the
governing. Also, the literature suggests that although the long-term implications of PB may
change the state–citizen interaction completely, the short-term social impacts are limited (Boulding
& Wampler, 2010). The potential of crowdfunding projects run by citizens using a digital platform
created and legitimized by the administration is also established (Gooch et al., 2020). Some
crucial factors outlined in the literature regarding the success of PB initiatives are: first, strong
state support to ensure inclusive representation of all stakeholders; second, availability and
sharing of information in the same capacity to all stakeholders; third, provisions to express and
record opinions of all stakeholder groups; fourth, avoidance of the problem of elite capture; and
fifth, active targeting of the marginalized to maximize the benefits of budget goals for significant
social change and reduction of the socio-economic divide.

5.3 Deliberative Governance
In 1980, Joseph M. Besettee introduced the concept of Deliberative Governance, representing a
democratic setup where deliberations are central to the decision-making process. The idea
behind this concept was the belief that modifications and adjustments could be made to individual
interests to create policies for the common good (Park et al., 2017). Researchers have discussed this
method of engagement and outlined characteristics of successful deliberations in a democratic
setup. First, all participants are considered and treated equally, free to question or intervene, and
everyone has an equal weight of opinion. Second, deliberations should result in the process of
social learning. Third, the deliberating body should be inclusive of all the stakeholders that can
be affected by the decision taken; and fourth, there is enough relevant information, engagement,
and discussion to be able to forge a consensus among conflicting interests (Newman, 2011; Parkinson & Mansbridge, 2012; van der Merwe & Meehan, 2012).
We see DG being adapted for two different types of structure. The first is the policy jury advocated
by Robert Dahl in 1970, who viewed DG as a counter to the limitations of elective democracy. It has
remained popular in recent times and is adopted by countries like South Korea nowadays for better
municipal administration. In this structure, representatives from different stakeholder groups are
chosen to assist the administration in reaching the best possible policy decisions and delivering
the common goal for local development (Chaudhuri & Kendall, 2020). The second form is called
Negotiated rulemaking, or ‘Reg-Neg’ (regulatory negotiations). Here a committee is formed with
elected representatives, community leaders, civic body organizations, and subject-matter experts
to discuss and develop policies. This disintermediation and direct involvement of the public in
policy decisions result in citizen empowerment and democratization of the policy-setting process
(García-Peñalvo et al., 2019; Garcia et al., 2020; Sixto-García et al., 2020). Long-term support for collaborative communities, imparting a sense of ownership over the design and operation of digital
initiatives, is the key to achieve sustainable deliberative governance (Dusi, 2019). The use of ICTbased deliberative governance is also explored for empowering marginalized and tribal communities using digital innovation and tools to solve their local administrative issues. Researchers also
see a reinforcement of the pre-existing societal divisions with explicitly visible benefits if the

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designers and managers of the initiative are not careful (Leong et al., 2016; Okunola et al., 2017;
Young & Gilmore, 2017). Local administrations also stand to improve in time by preparing the
younger generation for participating in local democratic governance and using deliberative platforms (Thijssen & Van Dooren, 2016). The process of deliberative democratic decision-making may
suffer when citizens, politicians, and administrators are strongly divided by ideology, religion,
regional issues, ethnicity, generations, and other socio-political schisms, economic disparities, and
identities (Bay-Meyer, 2013; Hendriks et al., 2013; Park et al., 2017; van der Merwe & Meehan,
2012). It is also essential to validate and generate support for deliberative decisions made with
the public to legitimise the actions of reg-neg committees or the policy jury, ensuring acceptance
and sustainability for such initiatives.
Scholars have discussed factors that facilitate and ensure the successful implementation of such
initiatives targeting DG: first, inclusive participation of all stakeholders; second, setting up of an
unbiased information-sharing infrastructure to break the silos; third, promotion of shared leading
and mutual understanding of issues; fourth, setting up ground rules to run neutral debates with a
focus on consensus-building; and fifth, designing an ICT platform based on these rules to facilitate
transparent and open discussion on policy decisions. Similarly, factors that may hinder such practice
are noted in the literature as: first, deeply divided representation based on creed, caste, religion, and
other social constructs; second, the problem of elite capture, which may lead to concentration of
power in place of distribution; third, an unbiased commitment of the state in providing support
to these initiatives; and fourth, ensuring that the ICT tools used in the PB initiative are actively targeting the marginalized without bias so that the expected social goals can be achieved (Park et al.,
2017; Saguin, 2018).

5.4 Digital activism
Political and social movements are the mainstays of democratic exercise of citizen power (Bucy &
Gregson, 2001). DA refers to the phenomenon where civic protests and activist action takes shape
and is conducted on the web sphere. Some of the most common forms seen throughout the literature are online petitions, cyber campaigns, and video activism (counter-surveillances) on social
media platforms (Coromina, 2017). Literature gives us cases such as the Arab Spring and the
#metoo campaign, where the internet and Web 2.0 technologies have been crucial in voicing
people’s concerns in oppressed political situations through user-generated content (Hermida & Hernández-Santaolalla, 2018; Soengas-Pérez & Assi, 2017). Access to information and the internet is now
seen as a fundamental human right. It forms the foundation for promoting activist behavior online
along with the low cost of access and basic digital literacy (Casero-Ripollés, 2017). Researchers call for
a shift towards the context of connective action in place of collective action (Leong et al., 2019) and
the association of human dignity with citizen activism and empowerment (Leidner & Tona, 2021).
Digitally active citizens can use and leverage ICT to drive collective action by developing self-generating knowledge networks. They can engage in crowdsensing initiatives to monitor the performance
of local governments, enforcing transparency and accountability (Fasoli & Tassinari, 2017; Georgiadou et al., 2011; Schradie, 2018).
The corruption of mainstream media and the dilution of their role in delivering information to the
public has given rise to digital journalism (Gertrudis-Casado et al., 2016; Nothias & Cheruiyot, 2019).
Studies were conducted on the need to generate a new type of political content based on big data
(Treré, 2016). Policymaker also have recognized the need to study citizen opinions and sentiments
on digital platforms like twitter (Ahn et al., 2021; Ridhwan & & Hargreaves, 2021). Research also highlights the need to be careful against elite capture and the algorithmic manufacturing of consent and
privacy violations in the name of security (Svärd, 2017). Contextual factors that play a significant role
in the promotion of cyber-activism are: first, ensured access to public ICT infrastructure; second, providing a low cost of access by employing proper policy mechanisms; third, ensuring a basic level of
digital literacy across all social classes and active targeting of marginalized groups to avoid elite

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR DEVELOPMENT

11

capture of the medium; fourth, unrestricted and unregulated internet for all; and fifth, designing of
internet governance policies by following a multi-stakeholder approach involving governments, civil
society, and academia.

6. Discussion
Table 1 presents a comparative view of the four identified literature themes allowing us to see the
bigger picture of DCE in modern democracies. It attempts to give a literature review exploring
bridges between different research clusters, building up a single knowledge area based on a
review method employed by Raghuram et al. (2019). The themes correspond with the ladder of
citizen participation in policy development, as defined by Arnstein (1969) and improved by
Connor (1988). Heeks (2020a) discussed a similar ladder of citizens’ e-participation, outlining
different roles taken by citizen users during the participation process. We found that the MCSD
initiatives are identical to the rungs of Education and Feedback using ICTs; PB initiatives could be
seen as similar to the rungs of Education, Consultation, and Joint Planning. If we consider Deliberative Governance, it is related to the higher rungs of Mediation, Litigation, and Resolution/Prevention.
These initiatives are based on the state’s efforts and participation in response to these efforts. From
the point of citizen power, this comparison holds meaning as all these models require increasing
levels of citizen education, feedback, and participation in the policymaking process.
We observed this similarity with one more framework of citizen participation given by Rosanvallon (2008), who defines democracy as being of expression, involvement, and intervention. We note
that the MCSD and PB initiatives correspond to the Democracy of Expression. Service delivery and
feedback networks for participation pave the way for informing people and soliciting their
opinion on resource allocation decisions. The democracy of involvement dimension is reflected in
the DG initiatives where policies are designed and operationalized based on the collective
decision-making of state and citizen. At last, the democracy of intervention can be seen in the
acts of DA taken up by citizens when they get together to make their voice heard and intervene
in the state’s functioning.
Our study aimed to move beyond the notion of citizen from a mere user to empowered individuals who can leverage ICT infrastructure as solution innovators or collaborators in designing and
implementing policies and initiatives that govern society. Keeping this in mind, we suggest the
matrix view of these e-governance initiatives based on political and IS standpoints for a better understanding (see Figure 7).
The axes here denote the theoretical foundations of the DCE process. The horizontal axis is
inspired by the IS-dominant literature. It draws from the evolutionary model of e-governance
given by Layne and Lee (2001), defining the different stages of developing an ICT infrastructure.
The vertical axis draws from the social sciences side of the literature and majorly from the various
models of citizen power, as discussed earlier. The matrix is divided into four quadrants. Each quadrant is associated with one of the themes identified, considering the level of interaction between the
Government and its citizens.
One of the major issues covered in the literature is the persistence of the digital divide. Scholars
used the theory of diffusion of innovations to explain this divide that is seen in society (Shelley et al.,
2004), helping us understand that adopting any technology is a gradual process and differs from
person to person depending on their attitudes. A method of crossing this divide to empower citizens
through digital inclusion projects was discussed by Smith (2014). It involves a hierarchical structure
of institutionalized inclusion projects based on a reliable technical infrastructure for all, leading to
training citizens and increasing their awareness in terms of using the technology, providing equal
opportunity for all to interact with and influence the technology, and finally, enabling transference
of skills so that normal users could be transformed into digital innovators (Fraunholz & Unnithan,
2009).

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S. SHARMA ET AL.

Table 1. Comparative summary of literature themes of digital empowerment.
Themes Covered in the Literature
Dimension
Objective

Approach

State-Citizen
Interaction

Multi-Channel Service
Delivery
Leveraging ICTs to
ensure availability of
governance to all
(Vyas-Doorgapersad,
2009; Subramanian
and Saxena 2008;
Fraunholz &
Unnithan, 2009)

Participatory
Budgeting
Use of ICTs to
crowdsource public
opinion on matters of
budget and resource
allocation (Baogang,
2011; Blakeley, 2010;
Naranjo-Zolotov
et al., 2019)

Deliberative
Governance
Using ICTs to involve
citizens in
administrative
decision making
(Pirannejad &
Janssen, 2017;
Park et al., 2017;
Bartoletti &
Faccioli, 2016;
Hendriks et al.,
2013)

Top-Down approach;
pertaining to
development of
service delivery
infrastructure and
efficient
operationalisation of
channels (Ashman
2001; Shelley et al.,
2004; Subramanian
and Saxena 2008;
Fraunholz &
Unnithan, 2009; VyasDoorgapersad, 2009)
Low; most of the effort
is from government
(Subramanian and
Saxena 2008; VyasDoorgapersad, 2009;
Kariuki & Tshandu,
2014)

Top-Down Approach;
Calls for
crowdsourcing of
public opinion of
matters of
budget allocation
(Sanderson 1999;
Bucy & Gregson,
2001; Maier 2001;
Boulding & Wampler,
2010; Baogang, 2011)

Top-Down
Approach;
involvement of
public as decision
makers (Parkinson
& Mansbridge,
2012; Mariën &
Prodnik, 2014;
Newman, 2011)

High; Both the State
and Citizens are
decision makers so
equal power and
responsibilities
(Kim 2010;
Blakeley, 2010;
Hendriks et al.,
2013; Bartoletti &
Faccioli, 2016)

NA; Can exist
without
government
support and
mostly seen as a
tool for dissent
(Leong et al.,
2019; Nothias &
Cheruiyot, 2019;
Soengas-Pérez &
Assi, 2017)

Accountability lies
with both the
government and
citizen
(Brinkerhoff &
Wetterberg, 2016;
Wenene et al.,
2016; Pirannejad &
Janssen, 2017;
Fraunholz &
Unnithan, 2009)
Cases cover
municipal and
city-wide cases
but no country or
state level
instance
(Bartoletti &
Faccioli, 2016; BayMeyer, 2013;
Blakeley, 2010;

Accountability lies
with citizens and
civic bodies
(Leong et al.,
2019; Treré, 2016)

Accountability

Accountability lies with
the government
(Vyas-Doorgapersad,
2009; Kariuki &
Tshandu, 2014; Fox
2015)

Medium; Government
initiates dialogue
with people to make
them aware and
collect their opinions
on resource
allocation
(Bhatnagar, 2002;
Subramanian and
Saxena 2008;
Touchton &
Wampler, 2014;
Durnová 2019)
Accountability lies with
the government (Kim
2010; Baogang, 2011;
Saguin, 2018;
Altermark & Nilsson,
2018)

Scale
discussed in
literature

Discussion ranges from
city to nation-wide
networks for service
delivery(Agrawal
et al., 2007; VyasDoorgapersad, 2009;
Subramanian and
Saxena 2008;
Bhatnagar, 2002)

Cases cover municipal,
county and statewide initiatives but
no country-wide case
(Blakeley, 2010;
Baogang, 2011;
Smith, 2014; Ganuza
et al., 2016; Saguin,
2018)

Digital-activism
Leveraging ICTs to
mobilise people
on topics of
public concern
and oppose the
abuse of state
power (Treré,
2016; Nothias &
Cheruiyot, 2019;
Leong et al., 2019;
Hermida &
HernándezSantaolalla, 2018)
Bottom-up
approach; can
exist without
government
support but
requires high
citizen
mobilization
(Leong et al.,
2019)(Penney
2020)

Has no restriction of
scale as it can
exist devoid of
state support
(Leong et al.,
2019)

(Continued )

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13

Table 1. Continued.
Themes Covered in the Literature

Facilitating
Conditions

Type of ICT
Deployed

Strong state
commitment,
availability and
access of ICT
infrastructure, Low
cost of access,
compulsory levels of
digital literacy
(Blakeley, 2010; VyasDoorgapersad, 2009;
Fraunholz &
Unnithan, 2009;
Subramanian and
Saxena 2008; C. Park
2003; Bhatnagar,
2002)
ICT Infrastructure to
ensure availability
and access for all;
Platforms as services
(May & Chadwick,
2003; Bhatnagar,
2002; Agrawal et al.,
2007; VyasDoorgapersad, 2009;
Subramanian and
Saxena 2008)

Strong state
commitment,
availability of ICTs to
create awareness
about budgetary
issues, proper
representation of all
stakeholders (Shelley
et al., 2004; Smith,
2014; GertrudisCasado et al., 2016;
Svärd, 2017; Saguin,
2018)

Specialised platforms
to provide budgeting
information to
citizens with
feedback
communication
loops to crowdsource
data (World Bank,
2008; Baogang, 2011;
Bay-Meyer, 2013;
Hendriks et al., 2013;
Ganuza et al., 2016)

Hendriks et al.,
2013; Gün et al.,
2020)
Strong state
commitment with
high levels of
citizen
participation, ICTs
to create
collaborative
platforms for
governance
(Svärd, 2017;
Ganuza et al.,
2016; Smith, 2014;
Durnová 2019;
Naranjo-Zolotov
et al., 2019)
Networking
Platforms were
citizens can freely
communicate with
each other and
Government
officials over
different issues
concerning their
lives (Park et al.,
2017; Bartoletti &
Faccioli, 2016;
Hendriks et al.,
2013; Parkinson &
Mansbridge, 2012)

High level of citizen
activism,
unrestricted
access to ICTs,
freedom to
express online
(Hermida &
HernándezSantaolalla, 2018;
Nothias &
Cheruiyot, 2019;
Leong et al., 2019;
Soengas-Pérez &
Assi, 2017)
Typically involves
citizen interaction
over popular
social media such
as Twitter,
Facebook etc.
while also
focusing on
mobile devices
which can enable
citizen journalism
by the use of
audio-visual user
generate content
(Mariën &
Prodnik, 2014;
Leong et al., 2019;
Hermida &
HernándezSantaolalla, 2018;
Svärd, 2017;
Soengas-Pérez &
Assi, 2017;
Gertrudis-Casado
et al., 2016)

The literature also invokes the theory of elite capture (Saguin, 2018) and elite pluralism (Bucy
& Gregson, 2001), which talks about governance driven by the technocratic elites as the general
public are disengaged and disinterested in political action. This acts as a structural and social
barrier for participation and engagement logic of e-governance and is a hindrance to citizen
empowerment. Scholars have called for a change in such governance measures to involve the
marginalized masses actively. The concept of monitorial citizenship is explored with the economic
model of democracy (Bartoletti & Faccioli, 2016), discussing the cost and benefits of participation
as an instrument of DCE. A monitorial citizen can evaluate government policies, services, and
public administration performance through interaction with different sources of information
and media. Three other forms of citizenship are also noted in the practice of e-governance
for empowerment: the single-click citizen with primarily online activity and presence; the deliberative citizen who participates and promotes discussions on different forums; and finally, a
citizen who can represent the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ and undertake crowdsourcing activities
for citizen activism.

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S. SHARMA ET AL.

Figure 7. Stages of the evolution of Digital Citizen Empowerment.

Newman (2011) invokes the neo-institutional theory from political science, discussing the attitude
of citizens towards digital means of service delivery and interaction with the administration. The
study notes a shift of professional discourse towards co-production and collaborative design of egovernance mechanisms. The literature also warns of past experiences where these new mechanisms were reduced only to symbolic actions, and no substantial change was observed. Scholars
point out crucial factors that affect the overall formulation and implementation of any initiative targeting the digital empowerment of citizens: first, organizational differences that arise due to the attitudes, notions, and personal goals of different people involved in the process; second, strategies
adopted to communicate with the masses; third, how to select citizen representatives ensuring participation of the marginalized; and finally, bringing together the people responsible for designing
and laying down any such initiative and the actual users of the initiative’s service for collaborative
design and policy formulation (De Mesquita et al., 2018; Fasoli & Tassinari, 2017; Fucg & Wright,
2001).
The discussion of empowerment in the context of public service paradigms is also noted following the rise of Digital Era Governance in the 2000s (Wenene et al., 2016). It describes the shift of citizens’ role from mere consumers of e-services to collaborators and co-designers of these services.
Scholars also discuss accountability as a remedy for lacunas in the current government models.
We can also explore the same angle in our literature based on the Principal-Agent Accountability
Model given by the World Bank (2003). It defines two routes through which accountability flows.
The first is state accountability, which focuses on institutions that monitor or control abuse of
citizen rights by public agencies or branches of the Government, also called Supply-side accountability. The second, social accountability, refers to action by citizens and civil society to hold government
officials responsible for reporting and answering for their actions, also called demand-side accountability. The literature in the area of DCE has a lot of focus on social accountability as a remedy for
government inefficiency and ineffectiveness. But scholars note that without the balance of both
these sides of accountability, the goal of citizen empowerment may be a distant dream (see
Bukenya, Hickey, and King 2012; Fox 2015; Gaventa and Barrett 2012).

7. Contribution to the theory
Through this study, we have attempted to explore the landscape of digital citizen empowerment for
establishing the knowledge societies of the future. We tried to present a conceptual model of the

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15

analysed literature during this review in Figure 8. The model encompasses the key stakeholders,
themes, action points for the practitioner, and theoretical blocks covered in the literature, which
are crucial for the phase-wise development of the information society (Rao, 2005).
The conceptual model presented in Figure 8 summarizes the literature we have reviewed to
understand and explore the concept of DCE and different strategies deployed by governments to
deliver empowerment to their citizens. It presents the theoretical foundations laid down in the literature for understanding DCE and how they relate to these four major strategic themes of empowerment initiatives which are complete fields of knowledge in their own right. The framework
attempts to incorporate the four distinct stages of development of knowledge society which are
defined in the literature as: first, provisioning ICT infrastructure for all; second, promoting active
digital citizenry; third, provisioning free and open data access about government policy and
actions, and fourth, the establishment of a digitally connected society with sustainable socio-political
participation backed by digital commons.
These phases are supported by specific action points depending on the type of strategy needed
to achieve them successfully. It is a compilation based on our internal discussions and our analysis of
the selected literature. These phases are outlined based on available institutional support and level
of citizen power, and active participation in the administrative process. The first two phases are the
fundamental blocks of building the prerequisite ICT infrastructure, followed by promoting the
public’s participation and avoiding the problems of the digital divide and elite capture. There is
an overlap between the literature for DG and PB as PB turns into DG with a gradual increase in
citizen power and available opportunities to participate (Fischer, 2006). We have also noted that
DA forms the backbone for such an interaction between the state and citizens. Without active citizens who participate voluntarily and are willing to make their voice heard, such initiatives would end
up being there just for show (Naranjo-Zolotov et al., 2019).
By laying down the foundations of an MCSD framework of ICTs, governments could ensure fast
and low cost of access to the web with a bare minimum standard of digital literacy (Nedungadi et al.,
2018). This would help connect all corners of a state and citizens to the Government, reducing the
number of intermediaries. The next phase is to be focused on the promotion of active citizen participation on these new democratic ICT platforms and portals by leveraging the ability of the internet
to promote both collective and connective action. This would be augmented by the availability of
open government data and active inclusion of the voice of the marginalized by the Government

Figure 8. Conceptual Framework for Digital Citizen Empowerment.

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S. SHARMA ET AL.

to reduce elite capture (Hossain et al., 2018). The target here would be to improve the efficacy of
people as individuals and members of communities socially or geographically. The third phase
starts with the active collaboration with citizens using ICTs for budget planning and distribution
of resources for the people they are meant for. This phase would be contingent on the success of
the last two phases and would need better levels of accountability and transparency in government
processes. With active recognition and awarding of participation efforts, governments can increase
the public value of participation, making it socially sustainable (Bataineh & Abu-Shanab, 2016; Gupta
& Suri, 2017).
The last phase of the conceptual model depicts the overlap PB shares with a deliberative democratic setup. We can only reach the utopian levels of DG when we have a participation-friendly base
in the socio-political system to start with. Deliberative citizenship is the outcome of active and voluntary participation from citizens in local governance issues in their communities or geographical areas
(Baogang, 2018). The action points laid out in the literature cover both the government and citizen
issues. Governments must ensure the availability of deliberative platforms on which people could
share, discuss and build consensus upon a common set of ideas and rules that govern them. The citizens are also expected to actively contribute to the deliberations to keep the conversation going as the
policy outcomes, and associated social good would be contingent on the same (van der Merwe &
Meehan, 2012). Such deliberative platforms would help achieve better transparency and accountability
for governance and enable the people to consult on and contribute to policy decisions.
Our model would help researchers to better understand the phenomenon of DCE for better e-governance in developing nations. It could be used as a base to study the growth and establishment of
information societies of the future in which cities and villages would be ‘smart’. Every household and
individual would be connected to each other and the Government and their service providers. This
study attempts to give a macro view of the process of digital era governance with the active participation of people as prosumers of government services and initiatives to solve administrative and social
problems at a local or national scale. This differentiates our paper from other ICT4D papers as most of
them are focused on a single issue or a single instance from one of the identified themes. However,
they acknowledge the presence of different contextual factors but do not explore them in detail as
it falls out of scope of their study. Their contributions are also crucial as, without the detailed micro
accounts of those studies, it would not have been possible to develop this conceptual framework
for DCE. Our conceptual model focuses explicitly on the problem of citizen empowerment as that is
the key to sustainable participation crucial for the success of any collaborative governance initiatives
in digital societies of the future. Our study outlines the overall process of digital society development
by defining it in a phased-out matter and laying down specific policy action points to focus on based
on the different guiding objectives or problems of different phases of development.

8. Implications for practice
We studied the triadic model of State-Citizen-Service-Providers interaction, covering the flow of
accountability and the factors that affect these interactions in the context of policymaking for
digital empowerment. The paper created an overview of various strategies for the political empowerment of citizens using digital means, and from this a conceptual model (Figure 8) for working
towards the digital empowerment of citizens was derived. The DCE framework can help governments at different phases of developing e-governance capability to focus and actualize their
efforts to foster and create the information societies of the future wherein governance would be
enabled via democratic platforms with equal powers and associated accountability for all stakeholders in the triad. The action points given in this model give out specific policy objectives to be
targeted for delivering empowerment to the people. These factors could also be seen as points of
policy evaluation in the context of DCE. The model also accounts for the rapidly changing nature
of technology and how it interacts with social and political factors in any setting to deliver policy
goals targeting the overall improvement of human capital and societal good.

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17

Our findings outline a phased-out plan to develop knowledge societies with empowered citizens
and break down all these phases into specific policy objectives based on theoretical understating
and building upon governance use-cases worldwide. For example, let’s take the case of the first
phase, i.e. ICT infrastructure for all. It is the outcome of the MCSD strategy and includes three
broad policy goals: first, ensuring basic levels of digital literacy in the citizen population; second, providing affordable and fast access to the internet, and third, developing and deploying the regionwide physical ICT infrastructure. Based on our understanding from the literature about government
initiatives worldwide, we can see how these policy objectives are critical and instrumental in reaching necessary policy outcome and successfully implementing the strategy of MCSD. In the same way,
we can explain and expand this understanding for all the phases of developing the information
society and deliver DCE covered in the model. All the phases are drawn out from different stages
of information systems development. They can act as guideposts for governments who want to
move towards a better state than they are now in the context of DG. Practitioners and policymakers
can use these theoretical blocks and specific policy objectives under each phase to develop a policy
audit checklist or maybe as a check right from the beginning of policy deliberations and development to ensure achievement of the outcome of DCE.
When seen in the light of theoretical discipline they are drawing from, these objectives can also
provide an idea of the type of human resource and academic or policy experts we might need to
operationalize these objectives for achieving the overall goal of DCE. Along with this, the model
can also help outline the need for specific technology infrastructure required at different stages
to complete DCE. The infrastructure needed at different phases would be different. As for MCSD,
it might need a service delivery network that will most probably be a one-way communication in
essence. Such an infrastructure would be obsolete and limiting for other strategies like PB or DG
as we need platform technologies there, which incorporate feedback and facilitate fully fledged dialogues and deliberations between different stakeholders in the governance process.

9. Conclusion
The area of Digital Citizen Empowerment explores how digital technologies could be leveraged to
strengthen the core of the anthropocentric structure of a democratic government. Empowering citizens is the key to changing their state from mere consumers of DG services to prosumers, collaborators, and solution innovators who can partner with policymakers to deliver improved policy
outcomes. It is crucial that participation from the citizens is voluntary and never mandated for the
development of a democratic e-government ecosystem that is sustainable and works as a self-generating knowledge network. Transparency, awareness, and accountability are seen as solutions for
this problem. Also, having more participation is just one part of the solution, but the complete
goal is also dependent on the quality of participation.
Our study uncovered four distinct strategic streams used to engage citizens using ICTs: MCSD, PB,
DG and DA. We further discussed these strategies in the light of citizen power and ICT frameworks.
We concluded that governments and civic bodies should strive for a balance between social and
state accountability to fill in the gaps left by older models of democratic governance. We were
able to synthesize and present the different promoting and obstructing factors of these strategies
and incorporated them into the conceptual framework of DCE. This conceptual model proposed
by us outlines specific research and policy points based on different strategic themes and theoretical
foundations for achieving stagewise development of empowering processes leading to the establishment of the information societies of the future.

10. Limitations and future research
We would like to acknowledge some limitations in undertaking this study, and the first one would be
our inclusion of studies only from the Scopus and WoS platforms. The search string used by us might

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S. SHARMA ET AL.

also be particular and limiting in the mining of relevant literature, and maybe this can be expanded
upon in future studies in the area. Only studies published and available in the English language were
included in our review. Only articles published in peer-reviewed journals were considered, which
may have resulted in some relevant conference papers being left out. Although these decisions
were conscious and mutually agreed upon by the co-authors, we note that some studies might
have been excluded.
Future research can also expand our study and focus on exploring problems like: How can we use
behavior strategies to better design policies that promote participation for empowerment? Scholars
working in the field of DG or IS could use the research design after improving on the limitations to
studying the four covered themes of DG, PB, MCSD, and DA separately and in detail to fill in the gaps
and build upon our study.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors
Swapnil Sharma is a PhD research scholar in the Information Systems Area at Department of Management Studies,
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. His area of research interests are ICT4D, e-Governance, digital public policy,
digital marketing and social media.
Prof. Arpan K. Kar is Amar S Gupta Chair Professor in Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. Within IIT Delhi, he
shares a joint appointment in the Department of Management Studies and School of Artificial Intelligence. Administratively he is the Chair of Corporate Relations (DMS) and is a member of Board of Academic Programme and Institute of
Eminence Committee, among others. His research interests are in the domain of data science, digital transformation,
internet ecosystems, social media and ICT-based public policy. He has authored over a 150 peer reviewed articles
and edited 7 research monographs. He is the recipient of Research Excellence Award by Clarivate Analytics (Web of
Science) for highest citations from 2015-2020. He is the recipient of Basant Kumar Birla Distinguished Researcher
Award for the highest count of ABDC A*/ABS 4/FT50 level publications in India between the period 2014 - 2019. In
terms of teaching cases, he is the recipient of the Best Seller Award from Ivey Cases / Harvard Business Publishing in
2020. As of 2021, he has over 4500 citations with an H-Index of 35 and I-10 Index over 80. He is the Editor in Chief
of International Journal of Information Management Data Insights, published by Elsevier. He is also Associate / Coordinating Editor in Int. Journal of Electronic Government Research, Journal of Public Affairs, Information Systems Frontiers
and Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management. He has been a guest editor for journals like Industrial Marketing
Management, International Journal of Information Management, Information Systems Frontiers and Australasian
Journal of Information Systems. He has received reviewing excellence awards from multiple journals like I&M, GIQ,
IJIM, LUP, JRCS, JOCS and ESWA. He has undertaken over 40 research, consultancy and training projects from organizations like BASF, PWC, Fidelity, EY, Facebook, CIPPEC, BitGrit, Govt. of India (DST, MOTA, MOT, MEITY, MHRD, etc). He has
received numerous awards from reputed organizations like Clarivate Research Excellence, Basant Kumar Birla Distinguished Researcher, 3 International Federation of Information Processing Best Papers, ACM ICEGOV Best Paper, TCS
Best Project, Project Management Institute Research Scholar, Association of Indian Management Schools Faculty
Research, IIT Delhi Teaching Excellence, Best Seller Case Study from Ivey / Harvard Business Publishing, and many
more best paper awards. Prior to joining IIT Delhi, he has worked in IIM Rohtak, Cognizant Business Consulting and
IBM India Research Laboratory.
M. P. Gupta is Professor at Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi; and Modi Foundation chair professor. Known for pioneering works in the area of e-governance, he has been spending significant
amount of resources in developing cases, tools and frameworks to promote e-governance research. These included
24 Doctoral thesis, 17 sponsored mega-projects, co-authored/edited 4 books and 200+ research papers. He has
been closely following Government of India (GoI) National Plan on E-governance which developed subsequently
into an umbrella program of ‘Digital India’. His studies have suitably fed into these programs in general and ‘Cyber
Security Policy of India’ in particular. His recent interest lies into exploring some the issues of smart cities. He is also
steering a European Union funded (Horizon-2020) project, which deals with the setting up of cluster-to-cluster partnerships between India and EU for the convergence of Future of Internet & Digital Media (FI-MEDIA).
Yogesh K. Dwivedi is a Professor at the School of Business and Economics at Swansea University in the UK. He was
awarded his MSc and PhD by Brunel University in the UK, receiving a Highly Commended award for his doctoral
work by the European Foundation for Management and Development. His research focuses on the adoption and

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR DEVELOPMENT

19

diffusion of ICT in organizations and in addition to authoring a book and numerous conference papers, has co-authored
papers accepted for publication by journals such as Communications of the ACM, the Information Systems Journal, the
European Journal of Information Systems, and the Journal of the Operational Research Society. He is Senior Editor of
DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems, Managing Editor of Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, Assistant Editor of Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy and a member of the editorial board/review board
of a number of other of other journals, and is a member of the Association of Information Systems, IFIP WG8.6 and the
Global Institute of Flexible Systems Management, New Delhi.
Marijn Janssen is Professor in ICT & Governance and chair of the Information and Communication Technology section of
the Technology, Policy and Management Faculty of Delft University of Technology. He is also an honorary visiting professor at Bradford University, UK. His research interests are in the field of orchestration, shared services and algorithms in
open and big data and infrastructures. He is co-Editor-in-Chief of Government Information Quarterly (GIQ), and associate editor of the International Journal of E-Business Research (IJEBR), International Journal of Electronic Government
Research (IJEGR), and Decision Support Systems (DSS). Janssen is on the editorial board of Information Systems Frontiers (ISF), Transforming Government: People, Process & Policy (TGPPP) and Information Polity (IP). He is also conference
chair of the IFIP EGOV series and is chairing mini-tracks at the dg.o, ICEGOV and AMCIS conferences. He was ranked as
one of the leading e-government researchers in surveys in 2009, 2014 and 2016, and has published over 400 refereed
publications. He was nominated in 2018 by Apolitical as one of the 100 most influential people in the Digital Government https://apolitical.co/lists/digital- government-world100.

ORCID
Swapnil Sharma
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1963-2062
Arpan K. Kar
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4186-4887
Yogesh K. Dwivedi
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5547-9990
Marijn Janssen
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6211-8790

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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR DEVELOPMENT

25

Appendix
Table A.1. List of selected studies
S.
No
1

Sanderson, I.

2

Bucy, E.P., Gregson, K.S.

3

Maier, K.

4

Ashman, D.

5

Bhatnagar, S.C.

6

Park, C.M.

7
8

Shelley, M., Thrane, L., Shulman, S., Lang,
E., Beisser, S., Larson, T., Mutiti, J.
Subramanian, M., Saxena, A.

9

Fraunholz, B., Unnithan, C.

10

Vyas-Doorgapersad, S.

11

Kim, S.

12

Blakeley, G.

13

Boulding, C., Wampler, B.

14

He, B.

15
16

17

Newman, J.
Georgiadou, Y; Bana, B; Becht, R; Hoppe,
R; Ikingura, J; Kraak, MJ; Lance, K;
Lemmens, R; Lungo, JH; McCall, M;
Miscione, G; Verplanke, J
Hendriks, C.M., Bolitho, A., Foulkes, C.

18

Bay-Meyer, K.

19

Touchton, M., Wampler, B.

20

Kariuki, S., Tshandu, Z.

21

Mariën, I., Prodnik, J.A.

Authors

Title
Participation and democratic renewal:
From ‘instrumental’ to ‘communicative
rationality’?
Media participation: A legitimizing
mechanism of mass democracy
Citizen participation in planning: Climbing
a ladder?
Civil society collaboration with business:
Bringing empowerment back in
E-government: Lessons from
implementation in developing countries
Quality of local government and
democratic citizenship
Digital Citizenship: Parameters of the
Digital Divide
e-Governance in India: from Policy to
reality. a Case study of Chhattisgarh
online information system for Citizen
empowerment (CHoiCe) Project of
Chhattisgarh state of india
Does e-governance facilitate citizen
empowerment in democracies? A
critical discourse analysis
The application of e-government for
increased service delivery in South
Africa
Public trust in government in Japan and
South Korea: Does the rise of critical
citizens matter?
Governing ourselves: Citizen participation
and governance in Barcelona and
Manchester
Voice, Votes, and Resources: Evaluating
the Effect of Participatory Democracy on
Well-being
Civic engagement through participatory
budgeting in China: Three different
logics at work
The involving public sector
Sensors, empowerment, and
accountability: a Digital Earth view from
East Africa
Localism and the paradox of devolution:
Delegated citizen committees in
Victoria, Australia
Do ortega’s citizen power councils
empower the poor in Nicaragua?
benefits and costs of local democracy
Improving Social Well-Being Through New
Democratic Institutions
Service delivery frameworks as
instruments of citizen empowerment: A
tale of two experiences, India and South
Africa
Digital inclusion and user
(Dis)empowerment: A critical
perspective

Year
1999

Source title
Policy and Politics

2001

New Media and Society

2001

European Planning
Studies
World Development

2001
2002
2003
2004
2008

Regional Development
Dialogue
Social Indicators
Research
Social Science Computer
Review
International Journal of
Electronic Government
Research

2009

International Journal of
Electronic Governance

2009

International Journal of
Interdisciplinary Social
Sciences
Public Administration
Review

2010
2010
2010

International Journal of
Urban and Regional
Research
World Development

2011

Public Administration
and Development

2011
2011

Distinktion
International Journal of
Digital Earth

2013

Policy Studies

2013

Polity

2014

Comparative Political
Studies
Development Southern
Africa

2014

2014

Info

(Continued )

26

S. SHARMA ET AL.

Table A.1. Continued.
S.
No
22

Smith, C.

23

Bartoletti, R., Faccioli, F.

24

Ganuza, E., Baiocchi, G., Summers, N.

25

Gertrudis-Casado, M.-C., Gértrudix-Barrio,
M., Álvarez-García, S.

26

Brinkerhoff, D.W., Wetterberg, A.

27

Wenene, M.T., Steen, T., Rutgers, M.R.

28

Treré, E.

29

Leong, C; Pan, SL; Newell, S; Cui, LL

30

Thijssen, P; Van Dooren, W

31

Park, T.I., Kim, P.S., Rosenbloom, D.H.

32

Casero-Ripollés, A.

33

Soengas-Pérez, X., Assi, M.

34

Svärd, P.

35

Pirannejad, A., Janssen, M.

36

Coromina, O

37

Young, J; Gilmore, M

38

Okunola, OM; Rowley, J; Johnson, F

39

Fasoli, A; Tassinari, S

40

Sasaki, F

Authors

Title
An analysis of digital inclusion projects:
Three crucial factors and four key
components
Public Engagement, Local Policies, and
Citizens’ Participation: An Italian Case
Study of Civic Collaboration
Conflicts and paradoxes in the rhetoric of
participation
Professional information skills and open
data. Challenges for citizen
empowerment and social change
Gauging the Effects of Social
Accountability on Services, Governance,
and Citizen Empowerment
Civil servants’ perspectives on the role of
citizens in public service delivery in
Uganda
The dark side of digital politics:
Understanding the algorithmic
manufacturing of consent and the
hindering of online dissidence
THE EMERGENCE OF SELF-ORGANIZING ECOMMERCE ECOSYSTEMS IN REMOTE
VILLAGES OF CHINA: A TALE OF DIGITAL
EMPOWERMENT FOR RURAL
DEVELOPMENT
Going online. Does ICT enabledparticipation engage the young in local
governance?
The Burgeoning but Still Experimental
Practice of Deliberative Governance in
South Korean Local Policy Making: The
Cases of Seoul and Gwangju
Producing political content for web 2.0:
Empowering citizens and vulnerable
populations
Cyberactivisim in the process of political
and social change in Arab countries
Freedom of information laws and
information access: The case of Sierra
Leone
Internet and political empowerment:
Towards a taxonomy for online political
empowerment
The struggle for the story in political
disputes: The case of the 9n 2014
participation process
Participatory Uses of Geospatial
Technologies to Leverage Multiple
Knowledge Systems within
Development Contexts: A Case Study
from the Peruvian Amazon
The multi-dimensional digital divide;
Perspectives from an e-government
portal in Nigeria
Engaged by Design: The Role of Emerging
Collaborative Infrastructures for Social
Development. Roma Makers as A Case
Study
Does Internet use provide a deeper sense
of political empowerment to the Less
Educated?

Year
2015
2016

Source title
Journal of Information
Technology Education:
Research
Social Media and Society

2016

Journal of Civil Society

2016

Comunicar

2016

Public Administration
Review

2016
2016

International Review of
Administrative
Sciences
IDS Bulletin

2016

MIS Quarterly

2016

Local Government
Studies

2017

Administration and
Society

2017

Profesional de la
Informacion

2017

Comunicar

2017

Information
Development

2017

Information
Development

2017

Profesional De La
Informacion

2017

World Development

2017

Government Information
Quarterly

2017

Design Journal

2017

Information
Communication &
Society
(Continued )

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR DEVELOPMENT

27

Table A.1. Continued.
S.
No
41

Saguin, K.

42

Hermida, A., Hernández-Santaolalla, V.

43

Altermark, N., Nilsson, H.

44

Naomi Bueno de Mesquita*, Nazli Cila,
Maarten Groen and Wouter Meys

45

Schradie, J

46

Durnová, A.

47

Naranjo-Zolotov M., Oliveira T., Casteleyn
S.

48

Nothias T., Cheruiyot D.

49

Leong C., Pan S.L., Bahri S., Fauzi A.

50

Kwak S.

51

Roberts A., Kelly G.

52

Gibson J., Hendricks M.D., Wells J.C.

53

Abu-Shanab E., Bakier R., Bataineh M.

54

Piñeira Mantiñán M.J., Lois González R.C.,
González Pérez J.M.

55

Boldbaatar D., Kunz N.C., Werker E.

56

Rodríguez R.A.M., Barreto A.C.

57

Salapuddin R.A.

58

Dusi, D

Authors

Title
Why the poor do not benefit from
community-driven development:
Lessons from participatory budgeting
Twitter and video activism as tools for
counter-surveillance: the case of social
protests in Spain
Crafting the ‘Well-rounded citizen’:
Empowerment and the government of
counterradicalization
Socio-technical systems for citizen
empowerment: How to mediate
between different expectations and
levels of participation in the design of
civic apps
The Digital Activism Gap: How Class and
Costs Shape Online Collective Action
Czech postcommunist trouble with
participatory governance. Toward an
analysis of the cultural agency of policy
discourses
Citizens’ intention to use and recommend
e-participation: Drawing upon UTAUT
and citizen empowerment
A ‘Hotbed’ of digital empowerment?
Media criticism in Kenya between
playful engagement and co-option
Social media empowerment in social
movements: power activation and
power accrual in digital activism
Deconstructing the multi-layered nature
of citizen participation in Vietnam:
conceptual connotations, discourses of
international development, and the
country’s institutional context
Remixing as Praxis: Arnstein’s Ladder
Through the Grassroots Preservationist’s
Lens
From engagement to empowerment: how
heritage professionals can incorporate
participatory methods in disaster
recovery to better serve socially
vulnerable groups
Can e-government empower Jordanian
citizens and reinforce citizenship?
New models of urban governance in Spain
during the post-crisis period: the fight
against vulnerability on a local scale
Improved resource governance through
transparency: Evidence from Mongolia
The library park project: Proposal for
redesigning the spaces in the Martí
provincial library to facilitate the
implementation of services impacting
community development
Is education a right or a privilege? A
direction to the twenty-first century
Social innovation driven by citizen-led
digital innovation: technologies of
citizenship and the war on
unemployment in Flanders

Year
2018

Source title
World Development

2018

Information
Communication and
Society
International Political
Sociology

2018
2018

International Journal of
Electronic Governance

2018

Social Problems

2019

Policy Studies

2019

Information Technology
and People

2019

International Journal of
Communication

2019

European Journal of
Information Systems

2019

Asian Journal of Political
Science

2019

Journal of the American
Planning Association

2019

International Journal of
Heritage Studies

2019

International Journal of
Electronic Governance
Territory, Politics,
Governance

2019
2019
2019

Extractive Industries and
Society
Library Trends

2019

Asian EFL Journal

2019

Citizenship Studies

(Continued )

28

S. SHARMA ET AL.

Table A.1. Continued.
S.
No
59

Authors
Garcia-Penalvo, FJ; Vazquez-Ingelmo, A;
Garcia-Holgado, A; Seoane-Pardo, AM

60

Quaicoe J.S., Pata K.

61

De S.J., Shukla R.

62

Balathandayutham P., Anandanatarajan
K.

63

Penney J.

64

Gün A., Demir Y., Pak B.

65

Cook J.B., Kogan V., Lavertu S., Peskowitz
Z.

66

Buettner A.

67

Casademont Falguera X., Prieto-Flores Ò.,
Brugué Torruella Q.

68

Sixto-Garcia, J; Rodriguez-Vazquez, AI;
Soengas-Perez, X

69

Garcia, X; Gottwald, S; Benages-Albert, M;
Pavon, D; Ribas, A; Vall-Casas, P
Medero, RS

70
71

72

Gooch, D; Kelly, RM; Stiver, A; van der
Linden, J; Petre, M; Richards, M; KlisDavies, A; MacKinnon, J; Macpherson,
R; Walton, C
Leidner, DE; Tona, O

View publication stats

Title
Analyzing the usability of the WYRED
Platform with undergraduate students
to improve its features
Teachers’ digital literacy and digital
activity as digital divide components
among basic schools in Ghana
Privacy policies of e-governance
initiatives: Evidence from India
Digital marketing through social
networking sites (Sns): A field of digital
empowerment
‘It’s So Hard Not to be Funny in This
Situation’: Memes and Humor in U.S.
Youth Online Political Expression
Urban design empowerment through ICTbased platforms in Europe
Government privatization and political
participation: The case of charter
schools
‘Imagine what we could do’— the school
strikes for climate and reclaiming citizen
empowerment
Local consultations on public space
management: between political
legitimation and citizen empowerment
Co-creation in North American and
European digital native media: Web,
social networks and offline spaces
Evaluating a web-based PPGIS for the
rehabilitation of urban riparian corridors
Democratization in Political
Communication
The benefits and challenges of using
crowdfunding to facilitate communityled projects in the context of digital
civics
The care theory of dignity amid personal
data digitalization

Year
2019

Source title
Universal Access In The
Information Society

2020

Education and
Information
Technologies
Journal of Public Affairs

2020
2020
2020
2020

International Journal of
Scientific and
Technology Research
Television and New
Media

2020

International Journal of
Urban Sciences
Journal of Politics

2020

Continuum

2020

Space and Polity

2020

Journalism

2020

Applied Geography

2020

Political Studies Review

2020

International Journal Of
Human-Computer
Studies

2021

MIS Quarterly

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317121993

The Use of Open Government Data to Citizen Empowerment
Conference Paper · March 2016
DOI: 10.1145/2910019.2910076

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University of São Paulo
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The Use of Open Government Data to Citizen Empowerment
- the case of "Caring For My Neighborhood"
Gisele S. Craveiro, Jorge A. S. Machado, Jutta S. Machado
Colaboratory of Development and Participation - University of São Paulo
giselesc@usp.br, machado@usp.br, jutta@usp.br

What problem was addressed and why it is important
Scientific literature also presents and discusses challenges and barriers to an effective citizen
empowerment, specially among the most marginalized ones. Unequal distribution of skills,
resources, and time have a big impact on who is making use of Open Government Data (OGD). The
reach they can have using OGD, as data literacy and skills of individual groups of citizens, and their
access to technology, should also be considered. Although it is argued that Open Government Data
have the ability to facilitate networks of collaboration and co-creation that produce citizen
empowerment, there is a lack in the literature about related OGD impacts and outcomes.
It is also fundamental to understand the ecosystem of data producers, infomediaries, and users: not
only each one's roles, but also the relationships among them which may contribute to, or inhibit,
citizen empowerment. But there is still a lack in scientific literature the assessment of civic
applications built on top of open government data.
The goal of this work is to analyze the output, outcomes, and/or impacts that a network of
organizations, institutions and individuals derives from OGD through a case study in the city of São
Paulo focusing on a budget transparency tool used by unskilled citizens. The Theory of Change
approach can sharpen the planning and implementation of an initiative, and this work adopts the
definitions of inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts from the Outcome Mapping
approach.

Figure 1: Geocoded Budget Visualization with the help of
Caring for My Neighborhood tool
Available at http://www.cuidando.org.br

How it was addressed
The tool was presented to almost 200 people (social leaders of grassroots movements and
public transparency advocates). They were asked to perform some activities with the tool. We
also performed in-depth interviews with a sample of participants.
Additionally, we carried out interviews with municipal officials responsible for policy-making in
the areas of access to information (the Municipal Board of Control), planning, and budgeting
(the Municipal Planning , Budget and Management).
In addition to the questionnaires and interviews, two technical visits and six observation visits
were carried out.

Figure 2: Steps to impact.

Findings and Implications
The results collected from interviews and
observations showed that the main outcomes and
impacts could be summarized as follow: the tool
influenced public managers perceptions about open
data and budget, it started the debate on
transparency and open data in local public
administration, raised citizens awareness on
budgetary data.
A preliminary analysis could gather the project
outputs and outcomes in four main impact areas:

Influence on citizens

Institutional influences

Media response

Influence on Civil Society Organization
The main outcomes and impacts of Caring for my
Neighborhood can be summarized and visualized in
the impact chain illustrated in the following figure.

Future Work

In relation of the theory of change, it is important to draw conclusions on aspects such as contextual conditions, activities and resources that
ensure outcomes and impacts. Concerning contextual conditions, we realized that factors like the access to computers and Internet, the
education level, and time are influencing the use of the tool. In order to include marginalized populations, it would be therefore very important to
work with Civil Society Organizations assuming the function of trainers and interlocutors.
Despite we found that displaying budget data in map form decreases some barriers and also increases relevance of the data by showing citizens
the effect of the budget in their neighborhood, we understood that workshops about the tool and the displayed budgetary data are especially
necessary for the segments of society with low educational level. For long-term use, it might be convenient to develop a short handbook about
budgetary data for download on the website, to ensure that citizens increase their understanding on the data.

:Lab

COLABORATORY OF DEVELOPMENT
AND PARTICIPATION
View publication stats

The funding for this work has been provided through the World Wide Web Foundation 'Exploring the Emerging Impacts
of Open Data in Developing Countries' research project, supported by grant 107075 from Canada’s International
Development Research Centre (web.idrc.ca). Find out more at www.opendataresearch.org/emergingimpacts

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

JeDEM 6(1): 69-79, 2014
ISSN 2075-9517
http://www.jedem.org

Open Government Data: Fostering Innovation
Ivan Bedini, Feroz Farazi, David Leoni, Juan Pane, Ivan Tankoyeu,
Stefano Leucci
I. Bedini, Trento RISE, Via Sommarive 18 Trento (ITA), i.bedini@trentorise.eu, +390461312346
F. Farazi, University of Trento, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Via Sommarive, 9 Trento
(ITA), farazi@disi.unitn.it, +390461283938
D. Leoni, Universtity of Trento, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Via Sommarive, 9, Trento
(ITA), david.leoni@disi.unitn.it
J. Pane, National University of Asunción, Polytechnic Faculty, Campus Universitario, San Lorenzo (PY), jpane@pol.una.py
I. Tankoyeu, Universtity of Trento, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Via Sommarive, 9, Trento
(ITA), tankoyeu@disi.unitn.it
S. Leucci, University of Trento, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Via Sommarive, 9, Trento
(ITA), stefano.leucci@unitn.it

Abstract: The provision of public information contributes to the enrichment and enhancement of the data produced by the
government as part of its activities, and the transformation of heterogeneous data into information and knowledge. This
process of opening changes the operational mode of public administrations, leveraging the data management, encouraging
savings and especially in promoting the development of services in subsidiary and collaborative form between public and
private entities. The demand for new services also promotes renewed entrepreneurship centred on responding to new
social and territorial needs through new technologies. In this sense we speak of Open Data as an enabling infrastructure for
the development of innovation and as an instrument to the development and diffusion of Innovation and Communications
Technology (ICT) in the public system as well as creating space for innovation for businesses, particularly SMEs, based on
the exploitation of information assets of the territory. The Open Data Trentino Project has initiated and fosters the process of
opening of public information and develops as a natural consequence of this process of openness, the creation of innovative
services for and with the citizens. In this paper we present how our project acts on long-chain, from raw data till reusable
meaningful and scalable knowledge base that leads to the production of data reuse through the implementation of services
that will enhance and transform the data into information capable of responding to the specific questions of efficiency and
innovation.

Keywords: Open Government Data, Open Data, Innovation, Entity, Sematic data, data integration, Big Data
Acknowledgement: We are grateful to Prof. Fausto Giunchiglia and KnowDive1 research group for coming up with the
notion of entity type and its application to OGD for generating entities as well as data integration. We extend our gratitude to
Lorenzino Vaccari for his support in the capacity of project manager. We are thankful to Gabor Bella for his collaboration in
the semantification of OGD. The authors wish to thank Mr. M. Napolitano, Dr. M. Combetto, Dr. R. Cibin, Dr. L. Paolazzi, Dr.
E. Bassi, Dr. L. Ruzzene, Mr. S. Santi and Dr. S. Ojha for their valuable contribution to the realization of the project.
Financial support for this project is provided by the Autonomous Province of Trento, Trento Rise, Informatica Trentina,
University of Trento and FBK Research centre.

1. Introduction
The process of opening the data in Public Administrations (PA) as a process of enhancement of
public information implies a radical change to the data approach and work inside the PA. This
1

http://disi.unitn.it/~knowdive/

70

Ivan Bedini, Feroz Farazi, David Leoni, Juan Pane, Ivan Tankoyeu, Stefano Leucci

takes time, an improvement of the data management methodology, creation of operational tools
and providing a reliable space for sharing. Governments of various countries and administrative
divisions thereof worldwide have nowadays been starting to release a huge quantity of datasets in
the context of the Open Government Data (OGD) movement (Ubaldi, 2013). The movement
became a shared policy after the European Directive no. 2003/98/CE (Public Sector Information
Directive), improved by the Directive no. 2013/37/UE. The first Directive has been transposed in
the Italian regulatory system with the Legislative Decree no. 36/2006 and the second one still
needs to be implemented. The main purpose of the PSI Directive is to enable the so called “data
re-use”, that means “the use by persons or legal entities of documents held by public sector
bodies, for commercial or non-commercial purposes other than the initial purpose within the public
task for which the documents were produced” (Directive 2003/98/EC).
In the context of the Autonomous Province of Trento (PAT), a large, diverse and interesting
collection of datasets are already published as OGD. New datasets are slowly becoming available
and the existing ones are updated whenever needed for the purposes such as correcting mistakes
and adding new data horizontally (as instances) or vertically (as properties). The data catalogue is
2
also linked with the website of the Department of Innovation of the PA . This department governs
the process of opening new data and the dissemination of the so called data culture. This is an
important result to reach both inside and outside of the PAT. People started understanding the
value of publishing high-quality data and the power in the reuse of them. Linking data will highly
foster the value of sharing data. It will also lead to a new kind of data-centric public bodies that will
empower citizens and generate innovative services.
Immense numbers of government datasets could open up new opportunities for application
developers and trigger disruptive business models to come (Ferro & Osella, 2013; Manyika e al.,
2013; Vickery, 2008). While quantity of such datasets is considered as satisfactory enough, quality
(e.g., correctness and vertical completeness) is yet to be improved (Bohm et al., 2012). Moreover,
loosely coupled nature of data is posing challenge in developing applications on top of them.
Therefore, there is a pressing need to leverage this data before putting them in action. To
overcome the issues and fulfil the demand, we made the following contributions in this paper:
I.

The description of the adopted opening procedure as an integral part of the change
management in a public administration.

II.

The implementation of a methodology for generating entity types (Maltese, 2012) out of
published datasets to model data as entities (Giunchiglia, 2012) for facilitating an
integrated, combined and extensible representation.

III.

The implementation of a procedure and the corresponding tool for dealing with
unforeseen data (along with known ones) about an entity, taking into account the
semantics.

IV.

Description of our experience in handling Open Big Data for building life style changing
unprecedented (in the region) applications.

The paper is structured as follows: in Section 2 we present the process that has been put in
place within the PAT and the choices made. In Section 3 we describe the entity type methodology
that we have adopted, helping creating integrated entities. Section 4 shows the automatic creation
of entities matching dataset schemas to the entity types. Section 5 provides a brief description of
open big data approach we are building. In Section 6, we present some applications developed on
top of entities and open big data. Section 7 concludes the paper.

2

http://www.innovazione.provincia.tn.it/opendata (in Italian)

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71

2. Open Data Trentino Overview
3

The Open Data Trentino project was created under the push of the local government of opening
their public information as expressed in the guidelines for the reuse of public data official document
(DGP, 2012). From the legal point of view, the process started with the adoption of the Provincial
Law no. 16/2012 (LP 16/2012), on the promotion of the information society and the digital
administration and for the distribution of free software and open data formats.
The process continued by adapting and improving, for the local administration context, the state
4
of the art of existing European good practices in matter of Public Sector Information (PSI) . The
result was the drafting of the Open Data Guidelines (Resolution 2858/2012).
The data hunting and publication process followed is a step by step, day by day, federated
approach by involving the local authorities since the beginning by asking to every provincial
department to open at least one dataset. Although the direct engagement of any department is
time consuming it has proved of being successful and brought the desired side effect of creating
enough awareness to the whole public administration and to spread the change paradigm. Many
aspects are involved in this process: from the data cleaning to the data modelling, from the privacy
issues to the intellectual property rights, from the dissemination aspects to the process design. At
the same time, we have focused at the creation of the Data as a Culture, by acting in several
dissemination and educative actions internally to the institution and with a broader scope at the
national and international level.
5

The Dati Trentino portal is built over CKAN , an open source data management system started
by the Open Knowledge Foundation and maintained by the CKAN community itself. CKAN is
specifically designed to allow programmatic access, finding and retrieval of dataset metadata
through web APIs to which we are currently contributing. For instance we developed dedicated
6
clients to access datasets in two different programming languages. The first one, Ckan Api client ,
is an open source Python based library used to add automatically harvested datasets into a
7
standard CKAN platform version 2.2. The second one, called Jackan , is an open source Java
based lightweight library with built-in support for provenance tracking to easily access the
catalogue data from Java.
As of October 2014, the government of the PAT published about 860 datasets in a catalogue
made available under the link http://dati.trentino.it more than a year ago, with an open license for
ensuring free and unlimited use and reuse of data, representing the engagement of about 60
provincial departments. The catalogue is clustered into 13 broad categories, each consisting of a
number of datasets, which are represented as one or more resources that are easily accessible
and downloadable often in CSV and/or JSON format, and occasionally in XML. Each dataset can
8
be mapped to DCAT , a vocabulary designed for describing catalogues and datasets thereof for
increasing interoperability. Just to cite a few of the published resources of high importance, there
are provincial budget and cadastre.
9

As shown by the result published by Dati.Gov.It , as we write, the Province of Trento is the most
performing catalogue in Italy in terms of number of published dataset, which confirm that the

3

http://www.provincia.tn.it/progetto_open_data (in Italian)

4

“Libro bianco per il riutilizzo dell’informazione del settore pubblico”, EVPSI Project (2012),
http://www.evpsi.org/evpsifiles/bianco_beta.pdf;
5

CKAN Platform, http://ckan.org

6

Ckan API Client, git.io/ckan-api-client

7

Jackan, https://github.com/opendatatrentino/jackan

8

http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/

9

http://www.dati.gov.it/content/infografica

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Ivan Bedini, Feroz Farazi, David Leoni, Juan Pane, Ivan Tankoyeu, Stefano Leucci

approach of involving directly the people working in the PA with the creation of a concrete data
culture is a successful approach.

3. Entity Type Generation
This Section depicts an entity centric approach for modelling OGD. It describes the generation of
entity types according to the data published in government data catalogues. An entity type (also
called as eType) is the class of an entity that has the right amount of attributes and relations for
forming the foundation of creating entities with their non-trivial details intended for an application
(Giunchiglia, 2012; Maltese, 2012; Farazi, 2008). Some examples of entity types are person,
location, organization and facility. An entity is a real world physical or abstract or digital thing that
can be referred with a name (Giunchiglia, 2012). For example, Dante Alighieri (person), Trento
(location), University of Trento (organization) and Trento Railway Station (facility) are entities.
In the context of this work, we have been dealing with the catalogue published by the PAT. As
shown in Figure 1, we divided the entity type development in three macro-phases - datasets
survey, attributes survey and producing entity types - each of them with different macro-steps.

Figure 1: Modelling Open Government Data as Entities
Modelling starts with the dataset identification step which relies on the scenario or task at hand.
For example, our scenario involves points of interest which include datasets representing among
others refreshment facility (such as restaurant, pizzeria, bar, etc.), recreational facility (such as ski
lift, sports ground, museum, etc.) and transportation facility (such as bus stop, railway station,
cable car stop, etc.). In the resource analysis step a rigorous study on the structure and content of
the corresponding file(s) is performed to understand the relevant resources for singling them out.
The attribute analysis proceeds through examining the attributes of the already selected
resources. With attributes, it means column headers in the CSV files, properties of objects in the
JSON files and sub-tags under repeated object tags in XML. Attribute values are also analyzed in
terms of availability (e.g., always, frequently, sometimes and never present) and quality (e.g.,
complete data with no or occasional syntax error, partial data with or without error and relational
data with or without disambiguated reference) of the data.
In the attribute extraction step, we differentiate between the kinds of attributes according to the
data encoded in them. Some attributes are used for encoding data and some others for managing
data (e.g., identifiers internal to the resource used as primary keys). In this step, we also merge
and split attributes, if necessary, according to the data. For example, nameEn (name in English)
and nameIt (name in Italian) can be merged into name, while opening hours can be split into
opening time and closing time.

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73

The attribute mapping step incorporates disambiguation of the attributes proceeds through
linking them to the right concepts in the knowledge base (KB). We identify two kinds of mapping,
direct mapping and indirect mapping. Finding the name of the attribute attached to the intended
concept in the KB and linking to it is called direct mapping. Not always a direct mapping is present
for an attribute. Finding the right sense of a term through its synonyms is called indirect mapping.
Note that synonyms can be suggested by user or retrieved from a KB.
The data modelling step leads to understanding an entity type from the attributes extracted in the
previous step and finding it (if exists) or a suitable parent (if created newly) in the already existing
entity type lattice, a lightweight ontology (see (Giunchiglia, 2009)) formed with the concepts of the
entity types. In the entity type development step, we produce a specification of an entity type
defining all possible attributes, their data types (e.g. string, float) and meta attributes such as
permanence (e.g. temporary, permanent), presence (e.g. mandatory, optional) and category (e.g.
temporal, physical).
While producing entities of a given entity type, mandatory and optional attributes are filled in with
data, which are semantified and disambiguated wherever applicable. In fact data for an entity can
come from multiple resources. Through semantification, we facilitate the integration of loosely
coupled data. In the case of unavailability of a mandatory attribute in the possible resources, we
signal it to the data provider as pro-sumers, see (Charalabidis, 2014) and do not allow the creation
of the corresponding entity unless all necessary data are present. This is how we can improve the
vertical completeness.

4. Open Data Rise
10

Open Data Rise (ODR) is an open source web application for data curation of OGD. It allows to
easily fix errors in source data and also to enrich names by linking them to their precise meaning in
a process called semantification. The framework employs the entity-centric model (Giunchiglia,
11
2012) and extends OpenRefine , an open source tool for cleansing messy data. The
semantification pipeline implemented in ODR is the result of the collaborative effort research work
developed in the KnowDive team of the University of Trento and Trento Rise. In detail, it consists of
the six steps depicted in Figure 2:

Figure 2: ODR Semantification Pipeline
During selection step (see screenshot in Figure 3) the framework allows the user to select a
12
dataset from any CKAN compliant repository. For catalogs previously analyzed by Ckanalyze , a
component we developed, repository statistics are also shown.
On the attribute alignment step the framework matches columns in the source data set to a
predefined set of entity types. A simplified example is presented in Figure 4. This step includes
finding the appropriate entity type for a given data set and mapping its attributes with column
headers in the dataset.

10

https://github.com/opendatatrentino/OpenDataRise

11

http://openrefine.org

12

https://github.com/opendatatrentino/CKANalyze

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74

Ivan Bedini, Feroz Farazi, David Leoni, Juan Pane, Ivan Tankoyeu, Stefano Leucci

Figure 3: Dataset Selection step of ODR pipeline

Figure 4: An example of a simplified schema matching
Once dataset schema has been determined, during attribute value validation step the user can
adapt the dataset to the schema, exploiting OpenRefine data cleansing capabilities.
Successive attribute value disambiguation step employs Natural Language Processing
techniques for enriching dataset content by linking names to known entities (such as Dante
Alighieri, Florence) and words to concepts (such as male, city). In Figure 5 we see a screenshot of
long text that has been automatically enriched. OpenDataRise will show in red elements that still
require manual intervention from the user.
Within entity alignment step the framework considers rows in the dataset as entities, i.e. real
instances. The goal of this step is to schedule changes to entity storage to be committed in the
next step. Such changes can be either update of existing matching entities or creation of new
entities with values from the source dataset.

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75

Figure 5: Example of semantic enriching in ODR
In the last entity import step, the user can indicate the license of entities to import and other
metadata to publish to CKAN. Updates and insertions are then committed to entity storage and a
new semantified resource is published on CKAN. The resource will contain the provided metadata
and a reference to imported entities in the entity storage.

5. Open Big Data
Nowadays big volumes of data are processed at an increasing rate, creating additional hidden
information. This information represents a central aspect in the definition of Big Data that can be
defined as Value. In fact, according to some industry analysts, dealing with Big Data means facing
the following aspects: Volume (huge amount of data generated or data intensity that must be
ingested, analyzed, and managed to make decisions based on complete data analysis), Velocity
(the speed at which data must be processed), Variety (the different types and sources of data that
must be analyzed and the complexity of each and the whole), Variability (intended as the inherent
“fuzziness” of data, in terms of its meaning or context) and indeed, last but not least, Value. Since
the public sector is increasing the quantity of data available to the public through many open data
initiatives, we expect that in the near future also collected data by these initiatives will thrive by the
adoption of BigData technologies to gather useful information from published data.
As part of OGD initiative of the PAT, we then focus on the problem of data explosion and the
consequent need of having fast and scalable solutions for storage and analysis. We estimate the
trend for growth will be up to hundred times per year, easily reaching the order of TB of data in few
years from now. For instance the Trentino portal already have sensors based datasets, such as
weather, traffic sensors, real time energy consumption and few others that, they alone already
provide few GB of data per day if collected. Due to this very nature, they pose challenge in using
traditional relational database management systems to handle them and at the same time appear
13
14
15
as a problem to be dealt with the Big Data technologies such as Apache Hadoop , Hive , Pig
and NoSQL databases. A kind of big data generated by various actors including government
13

http://hadoop.apache.org

14

https://hive.apache.org

15

https://pig.apache.org

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Ivan Bedini, Feroz Farazi, David Leoni, Juan Pane, Ivan Tankoyeu, Stefano Leucci

agencies and companies and published as open data is called open big data. The interest here is
focused on producing a Big Data platform directly integrated with the Open Data portal and able to
provide useful analytics, historical analysis in reasonable time.

6. Applications
Entities generated from open data as well as open big data exploitation resulted to the
development of applications which often appear as innovations to the citizens. This is because they
offer services that are either novel or come up with better results in comparison with the
contemporary ones. Moreover, open data propel innovations that help devising novel applications
and services (Chan, 2013).
In line with this consideration, as shown in Figure 6 and Figure 7, we developed an application
running on top of entities helps finding points of interest including restaurant, pizzeria and bar with
opening hours and bus stop, cable car stop and railway station with timetable and ski lift, ski rental
and ski school with timetable.

Figure 6: Faceted navigation for finding points of interest
Figure 6 sketches faceted navigation. For example, when user is in a ski lift location, selecting a
point of interest category or a subcategory shows the corresponding results on the map. Figure 7
shows semantic navigation. We call it semantic navigation as it exploits semantic relations like
part-of while exploration based search proceeds. To provide an example, when user is in a
museum, it can show, within a radius of, e.g. 500 m or 1 km, all kinds of points of interest also
located in the proximity of the museum itself. Finally, the bottom widget shows attributes and
general information about the selected entity.

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77

Figure 7: Semantic navigation for finding points of interest
16

OpenBus shown in Figure 8 is an application developed using open big data. This application
approximates real time (geographical) positions of the city buses in all the routes in Trento, based
on published bus schedule and 2 minutes temporal snapshots of their registered geo-location. This
last dataset, as we write, is not publicly available yet because of technical reasons.

Figure 8: Open bus mobile app and livemap view of the real time simulation
It employs big data analytics tools and techniques in collecting, storing and analysing data
generated by on-board sensors to predict delays on the basis of the current position of the buses.
The API providing access to the real-time prediction and the associated mobile app are based on
17
the open source OneBusAway platform .

16

http://livemap-bigdata.trentorise.eu (prototypal version)

17

http://onebusaway.org

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Ivan Bedini, Feroz Farazi, David Leoni, Juan Pane, Ivan Tankoyeu, Stefano Leucci

7. Conclusion
In this paper we depicted the approach we implemented in the publication of Open Data in the
Province of Trento. The result that we have already obtained is promising and we show that the
complement of the data culture along with a direct technical and legal support to PA employees
allow a faster diffusion and sustainability in the process of opening data within the public
administration. Furthermore, we proposed an approach for generating entity leveraging open
government data grounded on entity based infrastructure that by design facilitates consistency in
data representation and management. As such enabling the re-use of public sector information.
We also address the forthcoming data explosion issue by investigating and integrating since the
beginning BigData Technologies. The entity centric data representation and the infrastructure as a
whole can be considered as an input to the W3C Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group
to provide guidance to data publishers. Our future work involves the creation of a broader data
ecosystem. Communities, universities and other actors will be able to link their data using Open
Data Rise. Moreover, we will implement crowdsourcing techniques for improving the quality of the
existing data.

References
Bohm, C., Freitag, M., Heise, A., Lehmann, C., Mascher, A., Naumann, F., Ercegovac, V., Hernandez, M. A., Haase, P.,
Schmidt, M. (2012). Gov-WILD: integrating open government data for transparency. In Proceedings of WWW 2012,
pages 321–324.
Chan, C.M.L. (2013). From Open Data to Open Innovation Strategies: Creating E-Services Using Open Government Data.
Hawaii IEEE International Conference on System Sciences.
Charalabidis, Y., Loukis, E., and Alexopoulos, C. (2014). Evaluating Second Generation Open Government Data
Infrastructures Using Value Models. Hawaii IEEE International Conference on System Sciences.
Delibera Giunta Provinciale 2858/2012. (DGP, 2012)
http://www.innovazione.provincia.tn.it/binary/pat_innovazione/notizie/Lineeguida_21dicembre_def.1356705195.pdf
Directive 2003/98/EC (2003). Directive 2003/98/EC of 17 November 2003 on the re-use of public sector information. OJ L,
345, 90. European Parliament and Council. http://eurlex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2003:345:0090:0096:EN:PDF
Farazi, F. (2010). Faceted Lightweight Ontologies: A Formalization and Some Experiments. PhD Thesis, supervised by
Prof. Fausto Giunchiglia, International Doctoral School in ICT, University of Trento, Italy.
Ferro E., Osella M. (2013). Eight Business Model Archetypes for PSI Re-Use, Open Data on the Web Workshop, Google
Campus, London.
Giunchiglia, F., Zaihrayeu, I. (2009). Lightweight Ontologies. Encyclopedia of Database Systems.
Giunchiglia, F., Maltese, V., Dutta, B. (2012) Domains and context: first steps towards managing diversity in knowledge. J
Web Semantics (special issue on Reasoning with Context in the Semantic Web).
LP 16/2012. Provisions for the promotion of the information society and the digital administration and for the distribution of
free software and open data formats.
http://www.innovazione.provincia.tn.it/documentazione/in_trentino/pagina185.html
Maltese, V., Kharkevich, U., Radu, A.L., Semertzidis, T., Lazaridis, M., Ratailidis, D., Drosou, A., and Georgescu, M. (2012).
Deliverable D4.1 Space and Time Entity Repository, CUbRIK Project.
Manyika, J., Chui M., Groves, P., Farrell, D., Van Kuiken, S., Doshi, E. A. (2013). Open data: Unlocking innovation and
performance with liquid information. McKinsey Global Institute Report.
Resolution of the Provincial Government no. 2858/2012 - Guidelines for the use and dissemination of public information:
http://www.innovazione.provincia.tn.it/notizie/pagina482.html
Ubaldi, B. (2013). Open Government Data: Towards Empirical Analysis of Open Government Data Initiatives, OECD
Working Papers on Public Governance, No. 22, OECD Publishing.
Vickery, G. (2008). Review of recent studies on PSI re-use and related market developments. Information Economics Paris.
Final Version.

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79

About the Authors
Ivan Bedini is Team Leader for the Open Big Data collaborative project at Trento RISE. As team leader Ivan is responsible
of the development and maintenance of innovative solutions for the collection, integration and analysis of Open Big Data
linked with the Open Data portal of Trentino. Previously Ivan has been Member of Technical Staff in Bell Labs Research
Ireland, where he has been active contributor of the Semantic Data Access (SDA), and for the BigData analytics project.
Prior to joining Bell Labs in 2010, he was researcher at Orange Labs France in the Enterprise Applications and the Trust &
Secure Transactions research departments. During ten years at Orange Labs he held different roles as developer, technical
expert and project manager, and specialized in the domains of Business Process Management, e-business, knowledge
engineering and Semantic Technologies. He has also four years of contribution to standardization bodies as member of the
UN/CEFACT Information Content Management Group and member of OASIS ebXML Registry/Repository Committee. He
received his PhD from the University of Versailles, France, in 2009. He is expert in Information Extraction, Data Integration,
Semantic Technologies, BigData technologies and distributed computing.
Feroz Farazi is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Trento (UNITN) in Italy. Currently he is working in the
Open Data Project (http://www.provincia.tn.it/progetto_open_data/) funded by the Autonomous Province of Trento. He
obtained a PhD degree in Computer Science from UNITN in 2010. His research interests include Knowledge Management,
Ontologies, the Semantic Web and Data Integration. He has authored several publications including a book entitled
“Faceted Lightweight Ontologies: A Formalization and Some Experiments”. He has collaborated in the development of
GeoWordNet knowledge base at UNITN from 2009 to 2010. He has also collaborated in the Semantic Geo-Catalogue
project funded by the Autonomous Province of Trento. He served as an assistant professor from 2003 to 2006 in the
department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University of Chittagong in Bangladesh. He also served as
a lecturer in the department of CSE at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Bangladesh from 2001 to 2003.
David Leoni is a Software Engineer in the KnowDive research group at DISI department, University of Trento. He is the core
developer of OpenDataRise, an open source tool for data curation. With a background in privacy preserving data mining, his
interests currently span semantic web, teaching creative computing and visual programming languages.
Juan Pane is a Lecturer and researcher for Open Data at the National University of Asunción, Paraguay. He is also a
researcher of the Latin American Open Data Initiative (ILDA) and a consultant for the Democracy and Governance Program
for the Paraguayan Government funded by USAID and implemented by CEAMSO, Paraguay. He received his PhD in
Computer Science from the University of Trento in March 2012, where he later stayed as a post-doc research fellow (20122013). He led the development of Multilingual Open Source tools for Open Data Integration such as OpenDataRise and
CKAnalize for semi-automatically extracting semantics from open datasets for the Open Data Trentino (Italy) project
(dati.trentino.it). He contributed to the EU funded OpenKnowledge project in the area of semantic matching and to
the Insemtives project in the areas of semantic annotations models and semantic disambiguation in Folksonomies, all these
aimed at data integration. His current research and development activities focus in ICT based Innovations for Open Data
and Open Government initiatives by applying Semantic technologies and on designing automatic tools for Software Quality
Assurance. He has authored several scientific publications and journal articles.
Ivan Tankoyeu is a postdoctoral associate at the University of Trento. Currently he is working in the Open Data Project
funded by the Autonomous Province of Trento. He obtained his Ph.D. from University of Trento, Italy in 2013, having
awarded a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Belorussian State University in 2007. His main research interests include
data and knowledge management, event based media indexing, event mining and exploitation from spatio-temporal data,
context based analysis. He has authored peer-reviewed scientific publications in the top conferences of the Multimedia
research field (ACM MM/ICMR). He has served as the technical program committee on ACM MM Workshop HuEvent'14
and ACM ICMR'11. Previously he has worked on the EU FP7 Project CubRIK and EU FP7 Project Glocal.
Stefano Leucci is a Ph.D. Candidate at the ICT Doctoral School of the University of Trento, where he is member of the
KnowDive research group (http://disi.unitn.it/~knowdive). Due to his background in Law, he focuses his work on the interdisciplinary aspects of data management and low. He is currently a Fellow of the Nexa Center for Internet and Society of the
Polytechnic of Turin and he works as legal advisor in the Open and Big Data Project of the Autonomous Province of Trento
and TrentoRise.

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See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338968815

Citizen engagement with open government data: Lessons learned from
Indonesia’s presidential election
Article in Transforming Government People Process and Policy · January 2020
DOI: 10.1108/TG-06-2019-0051

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Title: Citizen Engagement with Open Government Data: Lessons learned from Indonesia’s
Presidential Election
Purpose: Citizen engagement is key to the success of many Open Government Data (OGD) initiatives.
However, not much is known regarding how this type of engagement emerges. The objective of this
study is twofold: 1) to investigate the necessary conditions for the emergence of citizen-led
engagement with OGD and 2) to identify which factors stimulate this type of engagement.
Design/methodology/approach: First, we created a systematic overview of the literature to develop
a conceptual model of conditions and factors of OGD citizen engagement at the societal,
organizational, and individual levels. Second, we used the conceptual model to systematically study
citizens’ engagement in the case of a particular OGD initiative, namely the digitization of presidential
election results data in Indonesia in 2014. We used multiple information sources, including interviews
and documents, to explore the conditions and factors of OGD citizen-led engagement in this case.
Findings: From the literature we identified five conditions for the emergence of OGD citizen-led
engagement: 1) the availability of a legal and political framework that grants mandate to open up
government data, 2) sufficient budgetary resources allocated for OGD provision, 3) the availability of
OGD feedback mechanisms, 4) citizens’ perceived ease of engagement, and 5) motivated citizens. In
the literature we found six factors contributing to OGD engagement: 1) democratic culture, 2) the
availability of supporting institutional arrangements, 3) the technical factors of OGD provision, 4) the
availability of citizens’ resources, 5) the influence of social relationships, and 6) citizens’ perceived
data quality. Some of these conditions and factors were found to be less important in the studied case,
namely citizens’ perceived ease of engagement and citizens’ perceived data quality. Moreover, we
found several new conditions that were not mentioned in the studied literature, namely: 1) citizens’
sense of urgency, 2) competition among citizen-led OGD engagement initiatives, 3) the diversity of
citizens’ skills and capabilities, and 4) the intensive use of social media. The difference between the
conditions and factors that played an important role in our case and those derived from our literature
review might be due to the type of OGD engagement that we studied, namely citizen-led engagement,
without any government involvement.
Research limitations/implications: The findings are derived using a single case study approach. Future
research can investigate multiple cases and compare the conditions and factors for citizen-led
engagement with OGD in different contexts.
Practical implications: The conditions and factors for citizen-led engagement with OGD have been
evaluated in practice and discussed with public managers and practitioners through interviews.
Governmental organizations should prioritize and stimulate those conditions and factors that enhance
OGD citizen engagement to create more value with OGD.
Originality/value: While some research on government-led engagement with OGD exists, there is
hardly any research on citizen-led engagement with OGD. This study is the first to develop a
conceptual model of necessary conditions and factors for citizen engagement with OGD. Furthermore,
we applied the developed multilevel conceptual model to a case study and gathered empirical
evidence of OGD engagement and its contributions to solving societal problems, rather than staying
at the conceptual level. This research can be used to investigate citizen engagement with OGD in other
cases and offers possibilities for systematic cross-case lesson-drawing.
Keywords: open data, open government data, engagement, citizens, conditions, factors, use
Article Type: Research paper

1. Introduction
Governments around the world are progressively opening up their non-personal and non-confidential
data online (McDermott, 2010). One of the central motivations for providing this Open Government
Data (OGD) is that citizens can engage with this data to create societal benefits, such as improving the
quality of public policy (Obama, 2009). Citizen engagement is key to the successful and sustainable
use of OGD (Dietrich, 2015) that enables collaborative actions (Sieber and Johnson, 2015, Susha et al.,
2017), which in turn provides new insights that potentially contribute to solving societal issues (Susha
et al., 2015).
Scholars in the field generally define user engagement as activities performed when using open data
to produce different types of output (Susha et al., 2015). These activities are associated with specific
tasks that have to be carried out by users, such as the discovery of specific facts in open datasets, the
creation of an interactive interface for accessing and exploring datasets, or the provision of a service
powered by open data (Davies, 2010). Each output requires different tasks and activities to be
conducted (Susha et al., 2015). For instance, ‘converting data to facts’ involves data searching and
browsing and fact extraction, whereas ‘creating a service on top of open data’ requires not only data
processing but also computer programming.
Nevertheless, simply creating an OGD-based output is insufficient in solving societal issues because
this output needs to be utilized by citizens to support their decision making or action to tackle a
particular societal problem. For instance, a website that compares spending data opened by local
governments (the OGD-based output) can be used by citizens to detect corruption (activity) and then
based on the identification of fraud, citizens can voice out a law enforcement agenda to public and
law apparatus (utilization). Therefore, we argue that citizen engagement is not limited merely to sociotechnical activities for generating a particular OGD-based output as defined by Davies (2010) and
Susha et al. (2015), but also concerned with citizens’ political participation to solve societal problems
utilizing the output of OGD use (Graft et al., 2016). Thus, in this particular study, engagement concerns
the multidimensional, socio-technical and socio-political acts of citizens involving OGD.
Citizen engagement with OGD can take multiple forms. First, it can be led and organized by
governments in the sense that governments determine when and where the engagement takes place
and under which conditions citizens can engage (Sieber and Johnson, 2015). This government-led
citizen engagement commonly manifests in events such as open data hackathons and innovation
competitions sponsored by governments. However, researchers have shown that e-participation
initiatives led by the government are sometimes not efficient (Hivon and Titah, 2017), while those led
by citizens can be more effective (Porwol et al., 2013). The second form of citizen engagement
concerns citizen-led engagement, in which citizens can organize themselves independently when
engaging with OGD and in which the content and processes of engagement are determined by citizens
themselves (Purwanto et al., 2018b).
Various government-led OGD engagement cases have already been investigated in the literature (for
example, Khayyat and Bannister, 2017, Juell-Skielse et al., 2014, Hjalmarsson et al., 2015, Hartmann
et al., 2016). For instance, Juell-Skielse et al. (2014) and Gama (2017) investigated the motivations that
drive citizens to engage in open data hackathons. Another example concerns the organizations of open
data hackathons (Hartmann et al., 2016) and barriers that constrain teams developing a service after
open data-based innovation contests (Hjalmarsson et al., 2015). However, cases of citizen-led
engagement have barely been studied. The few articles that focus on citizen-led engagement with
OGD mainly concern quality assessment conducted by their authors (for example, Vetro et al., 2016,

Whitmore, 2014). Not much is known about this type of engagement and therefore, our study aims
to fill this gap, particularly regarding how citizen-led engagement with OGD emerges.
The objective of this study is twofold: 1) to investigate the necessary conditions for the emergence of
citizen-led engagement with OGD and 2) to identify which factors stimulate this type of engagement.
Conditions are prerequisites that must be met for the emergence of OGD engagement, whereas
factors concern variables that contribute to the advent of OGD engagement. We formulated the
following research questions:
1) which conceptual model can be used to study how citizens engage with OGD themselves to
solve societal problems?
2) what are the necessary conditions for citizen-led engagement with OGD?
3) which factors stimulate citizen-led engagement with OGD?
This paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we first develop a conceptual model of
conditions and factors stimulating OGD citizen engagement using a systematic literature overview.
Then, in section three we use the conceptual model as a framework for studying a case of selforganized citizen engagement in the digitization of Indonesia’s 2014 presidential election data. Next,
we analyze the identified conditions and factors and derive recommendations for OGD policymakers
to enhance OGD engagement. Finally, we discuss our conclusions.

2. Literature review: a conceptual model for studying conditions and factors of OGD
citizen engagement
In this section, we develop a conceptual model that can be used to study how citizens engage with
OGD to solve societal problems. We first present the approach used to create the conceptual model
and then we present the model itself.

2.1. Systematic Literature Review approach
We carried out a systematic literature review to develop the conceptual model of OGD citizen
engagement. We searched the Scopus database for peer-reviewed journal articles and conference
papers that contain relevant terms related to OGD citizen engagement in their title, abstract, and
keywords (see Table 1). To obtain the most recent insights, we excluded papers from 2008 or older as
well as papers in other languages than English.
Table 1. Overview of search terms used in the systematic literature review.
Construct
Engagement
OGD

Condition
Factor

Search terms used in the systematic literature review
engag*, participat*, involv*, use, usage
open government data, public sector information, open data, public data, public government
data, open public sector data, open public data, big open data, big open public sector data,
open public sector information, open government information
condition*, stipulation*, constraint*, prerequisite*, precondition*, requirement*
antecedent*, determinant*, predictor*, variable*, factor*

We combined the search terms from Table 1 and generated a list of publications relevant in the
context of this research. This resulted in 311 publications. We assessed the identified articles in three
stages: first, we evaluated the domain and title; then, we examined the abstract; and finally, we
skimmed the content (see Figure 1 ). In the first stage, we excluded 278 publications from technical
domains such as computer science, chemistry, and diseases which utilized open data as a component

of a system described by the authors. In the second stage, we excluded 7 publications which we
deemed irrelevant to citizen engagement since they mostly contained the evaluation of open data
websites. In the third stage, we excluded 11 irrelevant publications because they did not focus on OGD
citizen engagement. We also applied forward and backward searching by examining the citations of
selected articles and adding relevant articles (Webster and Watson, 2002) and added eight additional
relevant publications. In the end, we included 23 articles that empirically investigated citizen
engagement in existent open data initiatives to create a conceptual model for conducting our case
study (see Appendix 1 for an overview). More information about the way that we analyzed the
selected articles can be found at the 4TU.Centre for Research Data through [link removed for blind
peer review]. This website also includes our underlying research data and more details of our research
method.

Figure 1. The inclusion and exclusion processes applied in the systematic literature review.

2.2. Findings from the Systematic Literature review: conditions and factors of OGD
citizen engagement
We identified conditions and factors for the emergence of OGD engagement in the 23 reviewed
articles and categorized them into individual, organizational, societal conditions and factors (see Table
2). We discuss each stream of conditions and factors below.

Table 2. A conceptual model of conditions and factors for OGD engagement synthesized from the literature.
LEVEL
SOCIETAL

ORGANIZATIONAL

CONDITIONS/
FACTORS
Conditions

TYPE

DESCRIPTION

SOURCES

Legal and political
framework

Factors

Democratic
culture
Resources

Institutional arrangements of OGD provision in forms of
legislation or state laws or regulations (e.g., Freedom of
Information Act, Anti-Corruption Act)
Society may demand greater access to government data
and information and transparency of governments
Budgetary resources needed for facilitating OGD
provision (e.g., investment of OGD infrastructures)
Means for communicating data users’ feedback on the
opened data and OGD provider’s follow-ups on users’
feedback
Aspects of institutional arrangement related to the
processes of OGD provision (e.g., culture, process,
structure)

Altayar (2018), Barry and Bannister (2014), Conradie and Choenni
(2014), Janssen et al. (2012), Neuroni et al. (2013), Wirtz et al.
(2016), Yang et al. (2015), Yang and Wu (2016)
Altayar (2018), Wirtz et al. (2017)

Conditions

Feedback
mechanisms
Factors

Institutional
arrangements

Technical factors

INDIVIDUAL

Conditions

Effort expectancy

Motivations

Factors

Technological structures, facilities and features (e.g.,
portals, tools, data, network infrastructure) needed to
make government data available and accessible online
The degree of ease associated with the efforts and skills
needed to engage with OGD (e.g., programming, data
manipulation and analysis, statistics)
Reasons that drive citizens to engage with OGD (i.e.,
intrinsic motivations, extrinsic motivations)

Resources

Facilitating conditions such as internet access, time, and
money needed for engaging with OGD

Social influence

Influence from the values and beliefs of important
others (e.g., supervisor, colleague, partner, family,
community, society) to engage with OGD
Perceived quality of the opened data (e.g., accuracy,
completeness, timeliness)

Data quality

Barry and Bannister (2014), Conradie and Choenni (2014), Svärd
(2018), Yang et al. (2015), Yang and Wu (2016)
Janssen et al. (2012), Máchová et al. (2018), Susha et al. (2015),
Zuiderwijk et al. (2012)
Altayar (2018), Hossain and Chan (2015), Janssen et al. (2012),
Máchová et al. (2018), Neuroni et al. (2013), Sayogo and Yuli
(2018), Susha et al. (2015), Wirtz et al. (2016), Yang et al. (2015),
Yang and Wu (2016)
Conradie and Choenni (2014), Hossain and Chan (2015), Janssen et
al. (2012), Máchová et al. (2018), Neuroni et al. (2013), Parycek et
al. (2014)
Janssen et al. (2012), Saxena and Janssen (2017), Weerakkody et al.
(2017b), Wirtz et al. (2017), Wirtz et al. (2018), Zuiderwijk et al.
(2015)
Kuk and Davies (2011), Purwanto et al. (2018a), Weerakkody et al.
(2017a), Weerakkody et al. (2017b), Wirtz et al. (2017), Wirtz et al.
(2018), Zuiderwijk et al. (2015)
Saxena and Janssen (2017)
Purwanto et al. (2018a), Saxena and Janssen (2017), Weerakkody
et al. (2017b), Zuiderwijk et al. (2015)
Janssen et al. (2012), Zuiderwijk et al. (2012)

2.2.1. Societal conditions and factors
The first stream of studies (nine papers) is concerned with societal conditions and factors underlying
open government which in turn enable the OGD provision. The conditions identified in this stream of
literature include the establishment of laws and regulations surrounding government data and
information publication. Laws and regulations, as well as policies (Yang et al., 2015), concerning the
freedom of information as a robust legal and political framework, are required to regulate the
continuous publication of government data (Neuroni et al., 2013, Nugroho et al., 2015, Altayar, 2018).
Without the framework, governmental organizations are likely to experience uncertainty regarding
their compliance with regulation (Barry and Bannister, 2014). This subsequently poses legal risks (Yang
and Wu, 2016) such as false conclusions drawn from OGD (Conradie and Choenni, 2014) and results
in legal barriers for OGD provision (Janssen et al., 2012, Wirtz et al., 2016).
The factors identified in this stream include the demands of society members (e.g., citizens,
journalists, researchers, activists) for the improved access to government data and information
(Altayar, 2018) and the increase of transparency (Wirtz et al., 2017). These expectations emerge as a
result of a global trend towards a more informed society through the rapidly growing use of ICT,
pervasive adoption of social media, and emergent innovations in technologies.

2.2.2. Organizational conditions and factors
Fifteen of the selected papers discuss organizational conditions and factors related to OGD
engagement. We identified two main organizational conditions required for the emergence of OGD
citizen engagement: the availability of resources for the publication of government data and feedback
mechanism between citizens and the OGD provider (Svärd, 2018, Susha et al., 2015). Sufficient
resources related to the government’s budget allocation are a facilitating condition needed to enable
OGD provision such as investment in infrastructures (e.g., platforms, software, tools) (Svärd, 2018,
Yang and Wu, 2016). Resources also concern the financial effects of OGD (Conradie and Choenni,
2014) such as liabilities, benefits, losses, and efforts (Yang et al., 2015). Resource constraints (Barry
and Bannister, 2014) may lead to insufficiency of budgetary allocation which may hinder
governmental organizations from publishing their data or decrease the quality of the opened data
(Svärd, 2018). Feedback mechanism, as a means for interaction between OGD provider and users, is
also an important condition for communicating data users’ evaluations of the opened data and followups on feedback made by OGD provider (Susha et al., 2015, Máchová et al., 2018, Zuiderwijk et al.,
2012).
The main factors identified in this stream of literature can be grouped into institutional and technical
categories. Institutional factors include external and internal institutional pressure, committed
executive leaders, organizational capability and culture, clear structure and definition of
responsibilities, support and promotion, and evaluation (Janssen et al., 2012, Altayar, 2018, Hossain
and Chan, 2015, Yang et al., 2015, Yang and Wu, 2016, Sayogo and Yuli, 2018, Neuroni et al., 2013,
Wirtz et al., 2016, Máchová et al., 2018, Susha et al., 2015). Technical factors concern integration and
interoperability with existing systems, interactive feature of OGD platforms, security and
standardization, and the use of emergent technologies (Janssen et al., 2012, Máchová et al., 2018,
Parycek et al., 2014, Conradie and Choenni, 2014, Hossain and Chan, 2015, Neuroni et al., 2013)

2.2.3. Individual conditions and factors
Research in the third stream (ten studies) gives emphasis to the perspective of individuals who engage
with OGD. The main conditions identified in this research stream are effort expectancy and intrinsic
and extrinsic motivations. Effort expectancy is related to the degree of ease associated with the efforts
needed to engage with OGD and shares similar measures with ease of use and task complexity


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