Increasing Awareness and Usefulness of Open Government Data: An Empirical Analysis of Communication Methods

Over the past decade, governments around the world have implemented Open Government Data (OGD) policies to make their data publicly available, with collaboration and citizen engagement being one of the main goals. However, even though a lot of data is published, only a few citizens are aware of its existence and usefulness, which hinders fulfilling the purpose of OGD initiatives. The objective of this paper is to fill this gap by identifying the appropriate communication methods for raising awareness and usefulness of OGD to citizens. To achieve this goal, we first conducted a literature review to identify methods used to raise citizen awareness of OGD. Then, these identified methods were confronted with the results obtained from an online survey completed by 30 participants on their preferred methods to provide recommendations to governments. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it provides an inventory of communication methods identified in the literature. Second, it analyzes the gap between the use of these methods in practice and citizens’ preference and uses this analysis to propose a list of methods that governments can use to promote OGD.