Citizen Engagement in Open Data Movement in Indonesia:Challanges and Impacts

Abtract—This article examines the involvement of citizens in Open Data (OD) movement. OD, as information that can be freely accessed by anyone, and for use, reuse, and redistribution by anyone, aims to make citizens can actively participate in processing it for their own interests and to participate in governance of government. “For Improved Governance & Citizen Engagement” is one of the principles of Open Data which is an idea that reflects the paradigm of New Public Services (NPS) or New Public Governance (NPG) which emphasizes the importance of citizen involvement in public administration. Based on Open Data Barometer report, Indonesia has a level of readiness that is good enough to implement data disclosure, among other Southeast Asian countries. Indonesia has started this project since 2012 with a pilot project in three regional governments namely DKI Jakarta Province, Bojonegoro Regency, and Bandung Municipality. The research was based on the issue that OD in its implementation has not been running effectively due to various obstacles, for example, according to a report from UKP4 (Presidential Work Unit for Development Supervision and Control, now called KSP/Presidential Staff Office): the coordination mechanism is unclear, non-optimal communication, many doors for data requests, and no data harmonization mechanism. Based on these problems central government encouraged regional governments to implement OD with four strategic stages that must be done, namely: early engagement, capacity development, implementing Open Government Data, and sustaining stages. This article describes those four stages and how citizens get involved at every stage, and the chalanges and impacts of this movement.