Inf Syst Front (2017) 19:285–300
DOI 10.1007/s10796-016-9679-1

Open data and its usability: an empirical view
from the Citizen’s perspective
Vishanth Weerakkody 1 & Zahir Irani 1 & Kawal Kapoor 1 & Uthayasankar Sivarajah 1 &
Yogesh K. Dwivedi 2

Published online: 23 July 2016
# The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com

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

* Vishanth Weerakkody
Vishanth.Weerakkody@brunel.ac.uk
Zahir Irani
Zahir.irani@brunel.ac.uk
Kawal Kapoor
Kawal.Kapoor@brunel.ac.uk
Uthayasankar Sivarajah
Sankar.Sivarajah@brunel.ac.uk
Yogesh K. Dwivedi
y.k.dwivedi@swansea.ac.uk
1

Business School, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, UK

2

School of Management, Swansea University, Swansea, UK

administrations in determining the policy instruments that can
increase the acceptance and use of open data through an active
promotion campaign to engage-contribute-use.
Keywords Open data . Government . Policy . Citizens .
Usability

1 Introduction
Open and accessible data revolution is underway. Citizens no
longer want to be passive recipients of legislation that is considered ‘inflicted’ upon them but rather, seek constructive
ways to engage-contribute-use the formation of public policy
as a means to enhance their civic responsibilities. However,
for this to happen, any engagement needs to orientate around
evidence that is underpinned by facts elicited from open
sources of big data. Consequentially, public engagement is
reshaping how knowledge is developed, shared and used by
citizens and stakeholder communities.
The push for making public services data available to the
community started around mid- 2000s with the European
Union directive encouraging greater realisation of the economic
value of public data through its reuse in 2003. Conventionally,
government departments retained public service data within their
systems, with limited information being released to citizens and
other stakeholders (i.e. businesses, charitable organizations, and
NGO communities). However, the spread of digital governance
and associated norms, such as responsiveness, accessibility and
efficiency of public services, transparency and accountability
(Carter and Weerakkody 2008; Wilcox 2010; Rana et al. 2015),
have motivated governments to exploit the potential of wider
distribution and use of such data (Sivarajah et al. 2015, 2016).
The United States (US) is one of the first countries to mandate the use of open data in December 2009. Six months later,

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