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Top1. Introduction
The 2009 Transparency and Open Government Memorandum issued by President Barack Obama (Obama, 2009), followed by the correspondent Directive (Orszag, 2009), marks a turning point in the public and political awareness concerning open government principles. Shortly after, in 2011, the Open Government Partnership1 was launched to disseminate the Obama open government principles and nowadays the partnership includes 65 participating countries committed to “develop and implement ambitious open government reforms”.
The ideas behind the Memorandum and Open Government Directive (OGD) were not totally new as they can be traced back to contributions and different perspectives from transparency advocates, technology savvy futurists, eDemocracy civic engagers, and bureaucrats aiming at legal compliance (Linders & Wilson, 2011). Nevertheless, the Memorandum and Directive clearly state and systematize three main goals of open government: transparency, public participation, and collaboration (Linders & Wilson, 2011).
Among these objectives, achieving governmental transparency through data disclosure has been the focus of attention by both academics and researchers, even prior to the ‘new’ open government prominence. This attention has concentrated broadly on two themes: the effects and impact of transparency as data disclosure, and the role technology may play in supporting transparency and increasing its impact. When considered together, these broad themes illustrate what Yu and Robinson (2012) call “The New Ambiguity of ‘Open Government’”: whether the open government expression refers to “the politics of open government” or “the technologies of open data”.
In what concerns the political dimension of open government, the OGD clearly identifies two potential impacts of transparency (Linders & Wilson, 2011), namely public accountability (Meijer, 2009) and added economic and social value stemming from the re-use of disclosed data (European Commission, 2011). But the importance of transparency in modern governance, broadly considered as the access to government information, is sustained by a number of other normative claims made in the literature about its effects, namely, that it fosters democratic participation, increases trust in government, supports prevention of corruption, and allows for informed decision-making (Bertot, Jaeger et al., 2010).
The technological perspective, on the other hand, emphasizes the potential of the internet in general (Bertot, Jaeger et al., 2010; Jaeger & Bertot, 2010), Web 2.0 technologies (Bonsón et al., 2012), social media (Kalampokis et al., 2011a; Kalampokis et al., 2011b; Bertot, Jaeger et al., 2010; Criado et al., 2013), data disclosure platforms (Alexopoulos et al., 2014), and open and linked data (Open Government Working Group, 2007; Eaves, 2009; Shadbolt et al., 2012; Berners-Lee, 2009) to promote transparency and data disclosure.