Citizen engagement in an open election data initiative: A case study of Indonesian's "Kawal Pemilu"

Citizen engagement is key to the successful and sustainable use of Open Government Data (OGD), involving multiple activities ranging from the retrieval and conversion of raw data to OGD based applications, to the use of these applications to solve societal problems. However, there is a lack of insight into what drives citizens to engage in OGD initiatives. Such insight helps inform policymakers in stimulating and improving the engage ability of an OGD program. This study aims to identify factors that influence why citizens engage in OGD initiatives. To attain this objective, we conducted a single case study of citizen engagement in an open election data initiative in Indonesia. Our study shows that social altruism as an intrinsic motivation is a strong driver for citizens to start and continue engaging with open election data. Low data quality appeared not to hinder citizens from engaging in the OGD initiative; in contrast, it can lead to more engagement. Election is typically concerning with political participation, yet trust and political efficacy factors only marginally influenced citizen engagement in our case study. The case shows that, in a time-critical situation where potential social conflicts were seen to threaten the citizens' lives, collective actions are enabled by the availability of OGD. We draw some key lessons learnt for policymakers to enhance OGD engage ability. Further research is needed to examine whether factors found in this particular case also apply in different settings.