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,