From Access to Effective Use: Open Data Portals for Everyday Citizens

Open government data allows for transparency from governments and access to data collected about its citizens. However, we are still far from achieving universal citizen participation because data literacy and experience are necessary to extract insights from data. There is also no guarantee if available data can address people's information needs. We explored the potential of open government data portals in addressing the information needs of citizens through an online survey and found that these can only be partially answered by the available data. To understand their information seeking behavior, we conducted usability tests of open data portals with 21 citizens, and used semi-structured interviews to identify gaps in the portals' design. We found that citizens would benefit from: localized and advanced search engines; and visualized, contextualized, and processed content for better sensemaking. We conclude with design guidelines for open data portals catered to citizens.