The workshop "Raising awareness and engaging citizens in re-using PSI" was held within the SHARE PSI 2.0 conference in Timisoara, Romania on March 17, 2015. The workshop was co-chaired by Daniel Pop, West University of Timisoara and Yannis Charalabidis, University of the Aegean. The workhop touched upon ways to enhance citizen participation and engagement in reusing open governmental data.
Several experiences to boost opendata uptake by citizens and entreprises were presented and discussed, resulting in a set of proposed "ways":
Way #1:
Give them a "home"
An open
data portal has to offer the ability to citizens / users to create and maintain
a profile
Way #2:
Make them customers / Create an Open Data marketplace
When a
citizen cannot find the dataset he is looking
for, he can put a request that is channeled to the appropriate
administration
Way #3:
Make them opendata publishers
Allow for
upload of datasets by users
Way #4:
Allow working on datasets / make them curators
A dataset
can be processed by a user and then republished as a new version. Datasets can be visualised, extended, linked
by users
Way #5:
Give them incentives
- Measure
and publish popularity of the users, based on their activity.
- Give
incentives for data usage / utilisation (e.g. free tickets to community events,
free parking, to most prominent users)
-
Organisation of competitions / datathons with prizes for the best applications
-
Organisation of data journalism competitions
for users
Way #6:
Involve them upfront
Organise
meetings of interest groups (e.g. finance, environment, etc) among interested
citizens and entreprises. Use questionnaires, for initial screening of ideas
and people.
Way #7:
Provide specific support for entreprises
Companies
have different viewpoint than citizens: they need data quality, availabiliity,
support, etc. So, provide something like
that for companies and utilisation will be higher.
Way #8:
Promote the creation of journalism teams
People
might want to “tell a story” acting like data journalists within the local
communities, but they might not have the skills needed
So, make
small groups among citizens to work around open data, generating small or
larger stories.
Way #9:
Provide training
Citizens
without the proper knowledge cannot take advantage of incentives targeting more
advanced people.
So, invest
in training citizens on basic digital skills (make a web site, work with a
dataset, write a story, etc)
A slideset of the main outcomes can be found here: http://www.slideshare.net/charalabidis/ways-to-boost-utilisation-of-open-data-by-citizens while a full description will be available in the SHARE PSI 2.0 project open database of best practices.
The workshop panel. From left to right:
André Lapa, AMA, Portugal (rapporteur)
Noël Van Herreweghe, CORVe, Belgium
Chris Harding, The Open Group, UK
Jan Kučera, University of Economics, Prague
Daniel Pop, West University of Timişoara, Romania (co-chair)
Yannis Charalabidis, University of the Aegean, Greece (co-chair)
Peter Winstanley, Scottish Government, UK
Robert Ulrich, KIT, Germany
Petya Bozhkova, Balkan Services, Bulgaria
Szymon Lewandowski, DG Connect, European Commission
