Framework to Evaluate Level of Good Faith in Implementations of Public Dashboards

Abstract

To hold governments accountable to open government data (GD) standards, public dashboards need to be evaluated in terms of how well they meet public needs. To assist with that effort, this chapter presents a framework and rubric by which public dashboards can be evaluated for their level of good faith implementation. It starts by reviewing challenges to governments sharing data in good faith despite increasing open government data (OGD) policies and laws being put in place globally. Next, it presents a use-case in which the authors explain how they examined a public dashboard in their local context that appeared to be following OGD, but not in good faith, and developed an alternative implementation that appeared to increase the level of good faith. The framework and rubric proposed were used to successfully compare and contrast the level of good faith of both implementations, as well as another public dashboard described in the scientific literature, and to generate recommendations to increase the level of good faith. In conclusion, the utility of this framework and rubric for evaluating and comparing good faith in public implementations of dashboards was demonstrated, and researchers are encouraged to build upon this research to quantify the level of good faith in public dashboards as a way of increasing oversight of OGD compliance.