The social impact of open government data in Hong Kong: Umbrella Movement protests and adversarial politics

Abstract

While there has been much anticipation that open government data (OGD) would increase the inclusion of marginalized groups in government decision-making processes, researchers have found little evidence of it. Such findings or lack of findings of social impact have led researchers to call for critical review of present notions of OGD’s impact and also for better theoretical frameworks. In response to these calls, we develop a theoretical framework based on an ethnographic study of civic use of OGD in Hong Kong. We argue that constrained by the deliberative democracy models that focus on existing mechanisms of political participation, researchers have tended to overlook the use of OGD for protests, contestation, and other expressions of adversarial politics, which also produce a use of OGD for social impacts.

Keywords:

• adversarial politics
• contestation
• data intermediaries
• deliberative democracy
• Open government data
• participatory democracy
• social impact

Notes

Notes

1 Janssen, Charlabidis, and Zuiderwijk (2012) define open government data as non-privacy-restricted and non-confidential data which is produced with public money and is made available without licensing restrictions on its usage or distribution.

2 “Impact” is a rather deterministic term [see Srinivasan, Finn, and Ames (2017) for an in-depth discussion on information determinism]. But it is the term used in the literature, academic and non-academic.

3 Carl DiSalvo’s class lecture at Georgia Institute of Technology in Spring of 2015.

4 In Hong Kong, LegCo members represent types of industry, which are also called functional constituencies, or geographically bounded constituent areas, also called geographic constituencies.

5 To scrape data is to extract it off of a website.

6 DIs who were academics had more privileges when requesting data because government departments are more likely to share data for a specific research use. Academic DIs also reported using grant funds to purchase government datasets, particularly map data. They were restricted from sharing data with users outside of their departments.

7 Emergency mapping platforms use crowdsourced data to map dangerous incidents and are often openly accessible online.

8 Being unmapped disadvantages a community in terms of access to government services.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by UNU-CS.