Open Data and Civic Engagement

The way everyone conducts their daily activities has forever changed since the arrival of advance information technology, particularly the internet. It does not only ease the way people communicate with each other, it also implicates to the way people communicate with their government. The utilization of technology in the day-to-day conduct of governance, or generally referred as e-government, enhances the way government performs, and at the same, the way general citizens expect their government to perform. The trend does not stop there. Particular technology enables new trend in data utilization that does not only improve government’s performance, but also generates opportunities for citizens and companies in general; the open data.

As mentioned in the previous articles, open data simply provides wide range of datasets from different sectors to be further used and analyzed by anyone for free. Often times, the datasets are released by government agencies through official portals, commonly referred as the open government data. The trend has evolved into a movement that is quickly followed by many governments in a lot of countries these days. In relation to the new patterns of government-people relationship, how does the open data affect civic engagement?

The discourse surrounding civic engagement has been around in the past decades. Some has come up with their definition and deeper explanation on civic engagement. Richard Adler and Judy Goggin were noting their definition of civic engagement, and has been cited by many in regards to this particular terms. Civic engagement is further described as the ways in which citizens participate in in the life of a community in order to improve the conditions of others or to help shape the community’s future. Although previously civic engagement mostly refers to activities conducted by youth, in the past years the inclusion of older generations’ participation in the activities of civic engagement has been noted as well.[1] Furtherly, Thomas Ehrlich also introduces an alternative definition to civic engagement. Civic engagement means working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes.[2] It is inferred here that civic engagement has to be built through two-way communication by the government and citizens.

Open data partakes in this case as a way government is opening up to their citizen. Although open data does not directly connect government and people in any manner, open data does provide information on government data, such as health cares, economic growth, agricultural industry, and the likes. Open data, in this sense, provides information about how far government has achieved and how well they perform.  This information indeed is able to drive people to become more active in being aware of knowing what their government has done. Aided by the internet era and the rise of social media, people now has easier access to engage with the government, using data they obtain from open data platforms. The engagement might take form as complains, advices, as well as critiques. Such data is able to fuel the information necessary to bring up complains, advices and critiques to be directed to the government. It is apparent here that open data also unlocks political potentials of the people, not only the so ubiquitous talks of economic potentials from this trend. Open data, as mentioned previously also, is not only managed by the government (open government data), some data are provided by indviduals, research institution, and the likes. This means that even more information and data that can be utilized to evaluate the government’s performance. This pattern of interaction is connecting the two in a way that has never been witnessed in the past.

Some stories of how open data helps forging the civic engagement can be seen in some developed society, Helsinki and Los Angeles, for example. People in Los Angeles, as one of the most internet-penetrated cities, have been actively engaged with the government using open data. Recently, complains on public transportation efficiency urges people to address the issue to the government. The government of the city, which already implemented advanced complain handling mechanism, reacted promptly to the complains by their citizen. People fetched the real-time data on public transportation, to further use that as the basis for complains. The innovation forged by the government is also driven by the fact that Los Angeles cooperated with some private companies working in digital industry to elevate their capability in delivering services in real-time basis to their people. [3] Similar method is also applied by the government of Tennessee and New York City, where real-time data on public transportation is delivered in transparency to their people, enabling them to get more critical upon seeing on-field peculiarities about their public transportation.[4]

The long term vision of creating well-engaged society, driven by technology and people’s willingness, is apparently one of the occurring agenda of the present government in Indonesia. Initiatives about the development of e-government and information society, for example, is fully supported by the government. However, open data and its advantages has not garnered wide attention by majority of people. Mainly due to the low penetration of internet in the country, and the existing digital divide, platforms on open data has not been utilized to its potentials. Government, as we can see, has not been very active in promoting this particular movement as well. Complain handling mechanism, for example, has not been attracting, as complain handling mobile applications have not been much downloaded and used by people. To unearth maximum potential of open data, both in civic engagement and economic activities, there needs to be further collaboration and commitment by the government, the people, private sectors, as well as the academic institutions. Only by this way, open data is able to create significance.  

[1] Richard Adler and Judy Goggin. (2005). ‘What do we mean by civic engagement?’. Journal for Transformative Education: 3(3).

[2] Thomas Ehrlich. (2000). Civic Responsibility and Higher Education. Phoenix: Oryx Press.

[3] Stephen Goldsmith. (2016). ‘Los Angeles’ Testing Ground for Transportation Efficiency’. Data-Smart City Solutions by Ash Center Harvard Kennedy School. 17 March. Accessed from <http://datasmart.ash.harvard.edu/news/article/los-angeles-testing-ground-for-transportation-efficiency-803>

[4] Lauren Adler. (2016). ‘Learning from Location: cities are leveraging mobile by adopting geotagging, geofencing, and location-based services’. Data-Smart City Solutions by Ash Center Harvard Kennedy School. 24 March. Accessed from < http://datasmart.ash.harvard.edu/news/article/learning-from-location-806>