icegov2012 proceedings

Open Government 2.0: Citizen Empowerment through
Open Data, Web and Mobile Apps
Rodrigo Sandoval-Almazan
Universidad Autonoma del Estado
de México
rsandovala@uaemex.mx
J. Ramon Gil-Garcia
Centro de Investigación y Docencia
Económicas
joseramon.gil@cide.edu
ABSTRACT
Although the open government concept is not new, current trends
in open government imply a change in focus from the traditional
principle of accountability to a concept of citizen empowerment,
collaboration and information sharing. In this paper, we explore
the use of open data and mobile apps in the top countries
according to the UN 2010 e-Government Survey. Our exploration
suggests that, although not all countries yet offer mobile apps to
their citizens, there is a great diversity of apps to create citizen
value. Moreover, private companies and citizens are getting
involved in the creation of such apps. More research is needed to
understand ways to promote the development of this kind of
government applications.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
Design, performance, human factors
General Terms
Performance, Design, Human Factors
Keywords
Government apps, apps, mobile apps
1. INTRODUCTION
During the last years, governments around the world have
emphasized the need of a more open and transparent government
[1]. Although the idea of freedom of information and open
government can be traced back to the 50s[2], the principle has
been invigorated with the Open Government initiative from the
Obama administration. Moreover, the traditional focus for open
government was accountability, while current efforts are
emphasizing on information sharing and citizen empowerment
[3]. In fact, the US government has made available about 390,000
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ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Luis F. Luna-Reyes
Universidad de las Américas-Puebla
luisf.luna@udlap.mx
Dolores E. Luna
Universidad de las Américas-Puebla
dolorese.luna@udlap.mx
30
Yaneileth Rojas-Romero
Universidad Autonoma del Estado
de México
yrojasr@uaemex.mx
data sets of raw and geospatial datasets to the public through the
data.gov website. Many other States are following the US
initiative, making raw data available to the public. On the other
hand, the popularization of mobile devices and social media tools
and platforms have promoted the emergence of new forms of
interaction between organizations and the public, or even among
the public themselves[4].
Small applications running on web pages or in mobile devices (or
mobile apps) have become a wide-adopted way of interaction.
Mobile apps stores were estimated to serve 17.7 billion downloads
in 2011, and it is expected that they will serve 185 billion
downloads by 2014 [5]. It is expected that mobile computing will
replace desktop computing by 2015 [6] . Again, just in data.gov,
about 1,500 web and mobile applications (apps for short) have
been developed, more than 200 by citizens themselves. We
believe that these two trends together have the potential to
transform the relationships between government and the public.
Despite this emerging context, we still know very little about the
level of adoption of apps in government websites anrd their use.
In this way, the purpose of this paper is to give a first step to
answer this set of questions, looking for an initial categorization
of practices among top-rated governments in terms of the use of
information technologies, as well as providing some examples of
current app use in government websites. To accomplish this
objective, the paper will be divided in five main sections. This
introduction constitutes the first section. The second section
includes a literature review. The third section describes the
method that we followed to survey the websites and to classify the
apps. The fourth section includes initial results, and the final
section discusses the findings and provides some future research.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
The literature review includes social media in government, and
the trend of web and mobile apps.
2.1 Web 2.0 in Government
At least since 2008 government web sites have been including
web 2.0 tools to become more interactive with citizens [7] [8] [9]
[10]. All of these applications, although may be very different in
purpose and function, they share some common features like the
collective generation and classification of content, the integration
of communities, and the production and consumption of socially
distributed knowledge. Web 2.0 is a social network platform