Citizen engagement in an open election data initiative

Abstract

Citizen engagement is key to the successful and sustainable use of Open Government Data (OGD), involving multiple activities ranging from the retrieval and conversion of raw data to OGD based applications, to the use of these applications to solve societal problems. However, there is a lack of insight into what drives citizens to engage in OGD initiatives. Such insight helps inform policymakers in stimulating and improving the engage ability of an OGD program. This study aims to identify factors that influence why citizens engage in OGD initiatives. To attain this objective, we conducted a single case study of citizen engagement in an open election data initiative in Indonesia. Our study shows that social altruism as an intrinsic motivation is a strong driver for citizens to start and continue engaging with open election data. Low data quality appeared not to hinder citizens from engaging in the OGD initiative; in contrast, it can lead to more engagement. Election is typically concerning with political participation, yet trust and political efficacy factors only marginally influenced citizen engagement in our case study. The case shows that, in a time-critical situation where potential social conflicts were seen to threaten the citizens' lives, collective actions are enabled by the availability of OGD. We draw some key lessons learnt for policymakers to enhance OGD engage ability. Further research is needed to examine whether factors found in this particular case also apply in different settings. CCS CONCEPTS• Social and professional topics → Government technology policy; Cultural characteristics; • Information systems → Collaborative and social computing systems and tools;

Digital Democracy in Indonesia’s 2019 Election: Between Citizen Participation and Political Polarization

“…Mata Massa is an application that was launched by Aliansi Jurnalis Independen (AJI) or Independent Journalists Alliance and ICT Laboratory for Social Changes (iLab) in November 2013. This application receives reports of election violations such as money politics through mobile phone [15]. Mata Massa deployed 200 volunteers to organize the reports submitted by the citizens through their devices [14].…”

“…According to Purwanto, Jansenn and Zuiderwijk [15], Kawal Pemilu faced a challenge in recruiting volunteers to digitise 478,829 C1 forms. In order to solve this problem, Ainun chose to adopt Multi-Level Marketing recruitment by recruiting ten friends as "downline" who then recruited another ten and so forth, through a secret Facebook group [15]. This method enabled him to gather 700 volunteers in only one day after he set up this platform [15].…”

“…In order to solve this problem, Ainun chose to adopt Multi-Level Marketing recruitment by recruiting ten friends as "downline" who then recruited another ten and so forth, through a secret Facebook group [15]. This method enabled him to gather 700 volunteers in only one day after he set up this platform [15]. Ainun also strictly applied confidentiality to the four initiators and volunteers to prevent bribery and intimidation.…”

Citizens’ Motivations for Engaging in Open Data Hackathons

“…We include six publications which are deemed relevant for this study (see Table 3). Based on the selected papers, we observed that many factors influence citizens to engage with OGD or to engage in an open data hackathon: intrinsic motivations such as fun and enjoyment and intellectual challenge [12]; extrinsic motivations concerning performance expectancy [13] or relative advantage [16], learning and developing skills, and networking [11,12]; effort expectancy [13] related to ease of use [17]; social influence [13,18] including contributing to societal benefits [11,18]; and data quality [18].…”

“…Purwanto, Zuiderwijk and Janssen [18] A participant's effort expectancy is related to the degree of ease associated with the use of open data and technology for solving a hackathon's challenge. It also concerns the participant's perceived capabilities/skills required for creating solutions which reciprocally affects the perceived ease of use.…”