Analysing User Involvement in Open Government Data Initiatives

Over the last decade, many Open Data initiatives have been launched by public administrations to promote transparency and reuse of data. However, it is not easy to assess the impact of data availability from the perspective of user communities. Although some Open Data portals provide mechanisms for user feedback through dedicated discussion forums, web forms, and some of the user experiences are listed as use cases in their portals, there is no consistent way to compare user feedback in different data initiatives. To overcome the difficulty of assessing user impact, this paper examines the activity generated by Open Data initiatives through the social network Twitter: a forum used by all types of stakeholders and publicly available for consistent analysis. We propose a methodology to compile a set of variables that describe both the main characteristics of Open Data initiatives and the associated Twitter activity. The collected data is then analysed using factor analysis and clustering techniques to derive possible relationships between the variables. Finally, the initiatives are classified according to their activity on social networks and the values that characterise some of their features. The methodology was evaluated by analysing 27 European Open Government Data portals and their activity on Twitter in 2021.