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Citizen engagement with OGD can enhance the effectiveness of governments and improve not only the quality of public policy-making but also public services provisioning and ability to address societal problems (Huijboom & Van den Broek, 2011). Citizen engagement with OGD refers to activities performed by citizens to produce artifacts such as applications, maps, visualizations, articles, or news based on the transformation of government data into fact, information, insight, interface, new data, or service (Davies, 2010; Susha, Grönlund, & Janssen, 2015). Society’s collective expertise and knowledge that are harvested in an OGD engagement, such as hackathons, can produce artifacts that create alternative solutions to solving societal issues (Kuk & Davies, 2011). For example, an election monitoring application built on top of open election data enables the provision of feedback to the election authorities regarding suspicious results that might lead to corruption (Graft, Verhulst, & Young, 2016).
Previous research in the discipline of social sciences shows that citizens are being driven to engage with OGD by factors like ‘performance expectancy’ and ‘social influence’ (Zuiderwijk, Janssen, & Dwivedi, 2015). A recent study in the United Kingdom (UK) shows that citizen engagement with OGD is driven by the relative advantage of open data, its compatibility, and the observability of its outcomes (Weerakkody, Irani, Kapoor, Sivarajah, & Dwivedi, 2017). In contrast, another study suggests that citizen engagement with OGD in public transportation hackathon is driven by intrinsic motivations such as having fun and enjoyable activities and intellectual challenge (Juell-Skielse, Hjalmarsson, Johannesson, & Rudmark, 2014). Furthermore, one study finds that citizen engagement with OGD in Swedish hackathons is mainly inhibited by resource-related issues, such as lack of time and money (Hjalmarsson, Johannesson, Juell-Skielse, & Rudmark, 2014). Yet, another study on open data barriers in the UK finds that not only resource problems inhibit citizen engagement with OGD, but also data quality and data portal quality issues (Martin, 2014). These findings suggest that the drivers and inhibitors that play a role in some instances of citizen engagement are different from those that play a role in other contexts. Various studies mention different drivers and inhibitors. Furthermore, studies on drivers and inhibitors of citizen engagement sometimes even draw contradictory conclusions.
Although previous research gives insight into citizen’s drivers and inhibitors for engaging with OGD (e.g., Hossain, Dwivedi, and Rana (2016)), they have not yet been integrated into a single conceptual model. There is a lack of insight into the enabling and disabling conditions that moderate different types of OGD use (Safarov, Meijer, & Grimmelikhuijsen, 2017). Hence, there is a need for a comprehensive model of drivers and inhibitors that potentially provides a theoretical argument for citizen engagement with OGD.
A recent review conducted by Hossain et al. (2016) shows that most literature predominantly focuses on organizational and inter-organizational perspectives. Not surprisingly, the literature emphasizes organizational analysis on OGD provision since open government initiatives have hitherto been supply-driven (Evans & Campos, 2013). Despite citizen engagement is among the purposes of open government movement and engaged citizens are regarded as key to the success of OGD programs (Dietrich, 2015), most literature simply speculates about citizens (Safarov et al., 2017). Current research is lacking studies at the individual level of analysis (Hossain et al., 2016), particularly citizens who engage with OGD.