Open Data and Transformational Government

Abstract Politicians have embraced the opening of public sector data. It is often assumed that opening up large amounts of governmental data yields considerable benefits by default. However, recent research has challenged the assumption that benefits will be gained automatically. In this paper we investigate the relationship between open data publishers and users. For this research governmental documents were reviewed and eight interviews were conducted with researchers working at a Dutch governmental organization. We found that governments are primarily focussed on the publishing process and not concerned with what will be done with the open data and what can be learned from the use of open data, although the latter results in obtaining the benefits. We conclude that the effective use of open data requires viewing the efforts for opening data from a networked governance view and that opening data requires transformations in the process of open data between governments and its users.