of urgency towards societal problems. Our case involves societal issues which are revolving around
government transparency problems and the fragility of social relationships. In the Western context,
governments focus more on stakeholders from sectors that produce economic value from open data
and overlook the transparency issues (Susha et al., 2015). The answers to the challenges might lie on
the improvement of data literacy and education among citizens, for example by organizing events to
promote the availability of open data such as hackathons and innovation contests. However,
educating citizens through formal and informal open data training (Gascó-Hernández et al., 2018) is a
long-term continuous effort. The training curriculum should combine the introduction of open data
and the teaching of analytical skills to encourage the use of open data (Gascó-Hernández et al., 2018).
Knowledge about the context (i.e., societal problems) and interactions with the government during
the course can increase the training effectiveness. The success of open data training can be
accelerated by implanting the training interventions in a specific context related to societal issues
(e.g., combating corruption, disaster mitigation) while taking into account the unique characteristics,
interests, and expectations of different types of users. Combined with collaboration between citizens
and other stakeholders such as private sectors, open data training can advance the formulation of
scenarios to solve societal problems as shown in the case of population decline in the Netherlands
(Ruijer et al., 2017).
Having the presumption that all the required conditions are met will lead to, predictably, the question
of whether citizen-led engagement with OGD automatically emerges. We suggest that governments
should also take contributing factors into account, particularly at the societal and organizational levels.
At the societal level, the magnitude of the demands of society for transparency will likely affect the
extent of efforts taken to release government data and establish regulations related to organizational
processes and structures of OGD provision. This requires the continuous cultivation of democratic
culture in government processes by involving public participation in policymaking. At the
organizational level, institutional arrangements related to organizational culture will likely affect the
interactions between data providers and citizens. We urge governments to improve their official’s
mental attitude toward serving the society at large and responsiveness towards feedback from the
public. Technical aspects of OGD provision affect the budgetary resources allocation of OGD
implementation. Integrating open data publication process into existing or legacy systems and
creating data interoperability across governmental units are costly and embedding them into
government budgeting will require more effort. Therefore, we propose a prioritization of opening
high-value datasets that are relevant and important to citizens. For example, government spending
data will likely be highly valued by citizens living in developing countries suffering from low
transparency.
At the individual level, beyond the open data training we suggested, political participation aspects of
voluntarism in citizen-led engagement initiatives can be complementary to explain the volunteered
acts. Empirical research and practitioners already suggested that engaging with OGD is a manifestation
of a citizen’s political and community interests toward solving societal problems (see Graft et al., 2016,
Davies, 2010, Hutter et al., 2011). One of the political participation models which have the potential
to predict independent citizen-led participation is Civic Voluntarism Model (CVM) (Verba et al., 1995).
CVM, in line with our findings, predicts that citizens will participate in a political movement if they
have the resources needed to participate (e.g., time, money, communication, and organizational
skills), they are psychologically motivated to participate, and they are asked to do so (volunteer
recruitment through social influence).