Hack, Mash & Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency

Crowdsourcing transparency requirements through structured feedback and social adaptation

“…The use of crowdsourcing in enhancing transparency is investigated, and advocated to be key to examining through the information provided by official disclosures, hacks, and mashups [16]. In accordance with this, we advocate that crowdsourcing can be utilised in the engineering of transparency requirements.…”

Stewardship and usefulness: Policy principles for information-based transparency

“…3-4) Researchers at Princeton and George Mason Universities share a perspective that rests on the assertion that government should be a publisher of free, open, structured, machine-readable data while private sector-or citizen-led initiatives should turn that data into useful, usable, and creative information products (Brito, 2007;Robinson, D., Yu, H., Zeller, W. P., & Felten, E. W., 2009). They assert that government is inevitably constrained from effectively using the most advanced technologies by an array of compliance requirements associated with privacy, confidentiality, cost control, FOIA requirements and others, as well as by lack of resources to explore simultaneously many new avenues of information management, analysis, and communication.…”

Design Teams as Change Agents: Diplomatic Design in the Open Data Movement

“…Information communication technologies have increased governments' ability to disseminate vast amounts of data, allowing developers to build public-facing applications [5,25]. But this young movement faces the special challenge of harnessing the collective participation of city agencies, third-party developers, and end users.…”

“…500,000 iPhone applications. Researchers have supported this proposition, saying the market allows novel and unpredictable ideas to bloom unrestricted by government's cumbersome procurement policies [5,25].…”

“…On the one hand, researchers have sounded a call for more open government data [5], agency compliance to open government initiatives [4], and resolution of complex tensions inherent in information-based transparency [12,13]. On the other hand, few studies have looked at how to pragmatically foster collaboration on open data among diverse stakeholders with conflicting interests.…”