Big data, open government and e-government: Issues, policies and recommendations

Abstract

The transformative promises and potential of Big and Open Data are substantial for e-government services, openness and transparency, governments, and the interaction between governments, citizens, and the business sector. From "smart" government to transformational government, Big and Open Data can foster collaboration; create real-time solutions to challenges in agriculture, health, transportation, and more; promote greater openness; and usher in a new era of policy-and decision-making. There are, however, a range of policy challenges to address regarding Big and Open Data, including access and dissemination; digital asset management, archiving and preservation; privacy; and security. After presenting a discussion of the open data policies that serve as a foundation for Big Data initiatives, this paper examines the ways in which the current information policy framework fails to address a number of these policy challenges. It then offers recommendations intended to serve as a beginning point for a revised policy framework to address significant issues raised by the U.S. government's engagement in Big Data efforts.Open Data policies and programs are at the center of the Obama administration's efforts to promote access, openness, and transparency [3,4,13,23]. Open Data is based on the idea that certain kinds of data should exist beyond the limits of copyright, patents, censorship, or other parameters often placed around data. Data is disseminated openly so that it is freely available to use, republish, and transform into new products. In a government context, Open Data creates opportunities for individuals, private sector organizations, and non-profits to find new insights in and create new products and services from the data [2,3]. An Open Data set can be of any size; however, many of the key Open Data initiatives championed by the Obama administration have involved Big Data -datasets that are extremely large and/or complex, offering the possibilities of identifying previously impossible levels of insights, granularity of analysis, and relationships between elements in the dataset. Big Data sets have become possible due to recent increases storage and processing capacity, as well as increases in the number of devices collecting and sharing data. Big Data require three key infrastructure ingredients: 1) a platform for organizing, storing, and making data accessible; 2) computing technology and power that can process large-scale datasets; and 3) data formats that are structured and usable. As they are typically so large that they exceed the capabilities of personal computing, Big Data sets generally are stored on large numbers of servers. Moreover, Big Data span a range of data types such as text, numeric, image, video, or combinations thereof, and they can cross multiple data platforms such as social media networks, blog files, sensors, location data from smart phones, digitized documents, and photograph and video archives.Big Data are being widely used by governments to identify and analyze problems, as well as to...

Reengineering the open government concept: An empirical support for a proposed model

“…On the other hand, other researchers concluded that distributing e-government content on many channels and social media application was considered a challenge for some users (Bridges, Appel, & Grossklags, 2012). Another important requirement for successful collaboration is the accessibility of big and open data technologies (Bertot et al, 2014). The authors listed several policy instruments for such purpose.…”

“…Still many researchers realized the direct benefits of open government and open data like: better efficiency, unified processes, crowd sourcing of feedback, better citizens participation, standardized operations, improved operations, and more satisfied citizens (Bertot, Gorham, Jaeger, Sarin, & Choi, 2014;Robinson, Yu, Zeller, & Felten, 2009;Tinati, Carr, Halford, & Pope, 2013).…”

“…Such definition guards for privacy issues and requires specific tools and systems to allow for such collaborative process. Finally, it is not enough to provide information (or big and open data), but to foster its use by the public (Bertot et al, 2014).…”

“…Collaboration might deem essential between governmental agencies to reduce redundancy and generate some cost savings, but would exponentially increase such benefits when opening doors for crowed-sourcing when benefiting from people through social networks (Ganapati & Reddick, 2014). It might be important to build communities that foster collaboration and engagement based on crowdsourcing and innovations (Bertot et al, 2014). Collaboration is the most controversial dimension among the three pillars of open government, as it means the inclusion of two parties in a process to produce something (a report, information, product, or any other item).…”

Opening Health Data

“…Collected as required by law or based on the mission or programmatic areas of government agencies Few characteristics of big data Government has released these data for decades, often on bureau Web sites and in formats that can be read by proprietary statistical software packages; as part of open government, these data are being released in different formats and on centralized platforms as open data Surveillance data (eg, National HIV Surveillance System, New York State Cancer Registry) Collected as required by law or based on mission or programmatic area of government agencies Have characteristics of big data: occur in near real-time (velocity) Government heavily protects these data through various regulations, privacy and confidentiality laws, and patient bill of rights Government has released tabulated health statistics for decades but as part of open government is releasing this information in more interactive and user-friendly formats such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's FluView Interactive and Diabetes Interactive Atlas, and New York's State Prevention Agenda Dashboard Social media data (eg, Twitter, Facebook, FitBit, mobile food diaries) Data are generated personally and distributed socially, often through social networking tools or businesses that compile the data Have characteristics of big data: transactions number in the billions (volume); may include geo tags, text, digital photographs, and videos (variety); and updated in real-time (velocity) As part of open government, public health departments are starting to engage with citizens in nontraditional ways through social media and networking aBig data often exceed personal computing capabilities, need to be stored on larger servers, require strong computational tools, and span a range of data types such as text, numeric, image, video, or combinations thereof 7. …”