Opengov and egov. Democratic challenges from a public value

Information Polity 17 (2012) 83–97 83DOI 10.3233/IP-2012-0269IOS Press

Open government and e-government:Democratic challenges from a public valueperspective1

Teresa M. Harrisona, Santiago Guerrerob, G. Brian Burkec,∗, Meghan Cookc,Anthony Cresswellc, Natalie Helbigc, Jana Hrdinovac and Theresa Pardoc

aDepartment of Communication & Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, Albany,NY, USAbDepartment of Public Administration, University at Albany, Albany, NY, USAcCenter for Technology in Government, University at Albany, Albany, NY, USA

Abstract. We argue that the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative blurs distinctions between e-democracy ande-government by incorporating historically democratic practices, now enabled by emerging technology, within administrativeagencies. We consider the nature of transparency, participation, and collaboration, suggesting that these processes should beviewed as means toward desirable ends, rather than administrative ends in themselves, as they appear to be currently treated.We propose alternatively that planning OG initiatives be addressed within a “public value” framework. The creation of publicvalue is the goal of public organizations; through public value, public organizations meet public goals with respect to substantivebenefits as well as the intrinsic value of better government. We extend this view to OG by using the framework as a way todescribe the value produced when interaction between government and citizens becomes more transparent, participative, andcollaborative, i.e., more democratic.

Keywords: E-government, e-governance, e-democracy, open government, collaboration, participation, transparency, democracy,public value, social media

1. Introduction

Barack Obama’s use of the Internet and social media technologies in his 2008 presidential bid iswidely credited with revolutionizing the contemporary art of political campaigning [54]. Victory hadscarcely been declared before predictions circulated that Obama would seek to translate features of thisexperience into the day to day administration of the executive branch [56]. Dubbed the first “InternetPresidency” [58], the President-Elect and his transition team quickly made good on these predictions. Inone of his first executive actions on January 21, 2009, President Obama issued a Presidential Memoran-dum on Transparency and Open Government [41] instructing the Office of Management and Budget topromulgate an Open Government Directive within 120 days.

∗Corresponding author: Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, 17 Wolf Road, Suite 301, Albany, NY12205, USA. Tel.: +1 518 442 3892; E-mail: [email protected].

1An earlier version of this manuscript appeared in Dgo ’11, Proceedings of the 12th Annual Digital Government ResearchConference. Digital Government Research Center, 2011.

1570-1255/12/$27.50 2012 – IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved

84 T.M. Harrison et al. / Open government and e-government: Democratic challenges from a public value perspective

The Open Government Directive ultimately issued on December 8, 2009 foregrounded the principlesof transparency, participation, and collaboration as “the cornerstone of an open government” [44]. TheDirective instructed federal agencies “to implement these principles” by broadening access to governmentinformation (including the reduction of Freedom of Information request backlogs), improving the qualityof government information, and creating and institutionalizing a “culture of open government” that wouldfocus on involving people with “insight and expertise” and forming “high impact collaborations withresearchers, the private sector, and civil society” [44]. Emerging technologies, which have the potentialto “open new forms of communication between a government and the people” [44], are viewed as keyto this enterprise. The Directive also instructed relevant Federal agencies to propose revisions to anyexisting policies that might pose impediments to using new technologies to promote open governmentgoals. Agencies complying with the Directive have subsequently made ample use of the Internet andthe Web, as well as new capabilities offered by social media, in the Open Government plans they haveproduced (see http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/documents/flagship-initiatives for an overview). Thus,in one breathtaking move, the Obama Administration substantially redefined the focus of e-governmentpractice at the federal level.

The novelty of the Open Government (OG) Initiative may best be appreciated by comparing it withthose of prior administrations. In the 90s, the Clinton Administration’s National Performance Reviewand subsequent Partnership for Reinventing Government focused on using technology in the back officeto effect business process improvement, and using the emerging World Wide Web to make accessible tocitizens information about government services and programs through the creation of agency web sites.The goalswere to improve agencyperformance, and ultimately reduce the size of federal bureaucracy [16,23]. The Bush Administration’s Presidential Management Agenda focused on developing cross-agencyprojects and platforms to make it easier to access relevant services and programs, reduce the business costsof providing information to government, improve information sharing between levels of governments,and improve efficiency [23].

In contrast, the goal of the OG Initiative is to make information and decision making processes infederal agencies accessible to citizen examination and input, and in so doing “facilitate citizens’ social andpolitical judgment” [26, p. 107] about the outcomes of government work. Broader access to governmentdata and other documentation, the ability to contribute to decision making processes within governmentagencies, and the possibility of responsible engagement with agency leadership in such processes areincrementally more democratic actions that lie at the heart of the open government vision. Thus, itappears that a substantially new and expansive approach to democratic governance may be unfolding atthe federal level.

What is not yet clear is how to assess the impact of the programs and policies created in pursuit oftransparency, participation, and collaboration. While these key terms resonate in familiar and positiveways, it is not obvious how to determine what actions and programs count as transparent, participative, orcollaborative, and from whose perspective such judgments should be evaluated. For example, Sifry [52]reports that “[l]iterally hundreds of thousands of data streams are coming online at Data.gov and in theprocess a whole new kind of public engagement with public information is being enabled” [52, p. 119].But even if one assumes that the data is both usable and of high quality, which cannot be taken forgranted [4,17], does the act of making greater amounts of government data available to the public byitself count as “transparency” and what kinds of metrics present a clear basis for making this case?Will involving citizens in agency decision making increase the extent to which that agency is viewed as“participative,” and whose perceptions count in arriving at such a conclusion? These are difficult issuesthat have not yet been directly confronted.

T.M. Harrison et al. / Open government and e-government: Democratic challenges from a public value perspective 85

In this paper, we consider OG and its broader implications for the future of public administration;we further propose a conceptual framework to guide policy makers in planning their open governmentprograms. We begin by situating OG within two traditions of thought addressing the relationshipbetween technology, democracy, and government – e-democracy and e-government – suggesting that theOG Initiative blurs these distinctions by incorporating historically democratic practices, now enabled byemerging technology, within administrative agencies. We then consider how transparency, participation,and collaboration function as democratic practices in administrative agencies. Our analysis suggeststhat these qualities can be used to produce an environment characterized by democratic practices. Buttransparency, participation, and collaboration are potential attributes of administrative action and decisionmaking that should not in themselves constitute the end or objective of administrative action. Instead,they are means to greater ends, although what those ends might be is not yet completely evident.

We propose alternatively that planning and assessing OG related programs and projects be addressedwithin a “public value” framework, which assumes that the creation of public value, represented ininformation, programs, and benefits, is the goal of public organizations; through public value, publicorganizations serve the interests of the public. We extend this view to OG by using the framework as away to describe the value produced when interaction between government and citizens becomes moretransparent, participative, and collaborative. We conclude that OG efforts may ultimately have the effectof stimulating deeper changes in the structure and organization of the federal bureaucracy by exposingthe ways in which more transparent, participative, and collaborative administrative mechanisms produceconcrete outcomes that are valued by government agencies and their stakeholders.

2. Technology, democracy, and government

The idea of using new technologies to support, expand, or re-invigorate democratic practices is notnovel. The history of 20th century media has demonstrated that the introduction of new communicationtechnologies routinely gives rise to intense speculation about their impact on the processes and practices ofdemocracy [28]. In the case of computer-mediated information and communication technologies (ICT),that speculation has been particularly intense, and has been applied to broad processes of democraticdecision making as e-democracy,as well as to more targeted forms of government action as e-government.

Studies of e-democracy generally focus on the ways that the Internet and its associated technologiesmay work to “amplify the political voice of ordinary citizens” [31, p. 6] by increasing the availability ofinformation required to develop policy preferences; by dislocating entrenchedmonopolies on informationdistribution by media elites in favor of other information providers; by encouraging political participationin campaigning, referenda, voting, and discussion with elected representatives; and by engaging indeliberation over policy in public venues.

In contrast, the field of e-government has focused on the use of technology within the routine ac-tivities undertaken by public organizations [16]: the provision of public services, the quality and cost-effectiveness of basic government operations, citizen engagement and consultation, the statutes andlegislative mandates required to effect these processes, and the administrative and institutional reformsundertaken in pursuit of innovation. Indeed, as Chadwick and May [8] have demonstrated through theirexamination of e-government initiatives in the U.S., Great Britain, and the European Union, a “manage-rial” mode of interaction through information and communication technologies (ICT) between citizensand federal agencies has been historically privileged at the expense of more consultative or participa-tory modes of interaction. This is not to say that participation and engagement have not figured at allwithin the e-government field. Riley [48] and Cullen [14] have differentiated between e-government and


e-governance, with the latter defined as programs that invite “citizens to engage in the policy processesof oversight through a range of technologies from e-mail, to social networking applications, and onlineconferencing. Electronic consultation includes more formal systems of e-engagement, initiatives suchas the US E-rulemaking process, and e-participation initiatives” [14, p. 58]. However, e-governanceactivities have not been the focus of previous presidential administrations, nor have they been evident atmost state or local government levels.

This may be because administrative agencies have traditionally not been viewed as sites for politicaldecision making. The decisions made by administrators have been assumed to be largely technical, takenprincipally to implement legislative mandates, and best made by agency employees who are assumedto possess requisite expertise. Thus, participation with the public is not needed. More recently, thisperspective has been sharply critiqued. Some doubt the assumption that administrators invariably possessthe expertise required for wise decision making [41]. But it is also increasingly recognized that agencies“make decisions that they believe are technical that in fact are not” [11, p. 14]. Administrators exercisediscretion in selecting among options for designing and implementing policy; in doing so, they makevalue judgments at all stages of the policy process [49, p. 5]. These value judgments are implicit incompeting visions in society of what is “good” and bureaucrats confront trade-offs between the differentvalues to be pursued [11]. In this sense, the decisions taken by administrative agencies are far fromvalue-neutral; on the contrary, they are political and very much wrapped up in the dynamics of democraticpolitics.

It is increasingly recognized that administrative agencies must be responsive to public will [33], whichcan be accomplished indirectly through action by elected representatives. Directly, legislation such asthe Administrative Procedures Act of 1946 has compelled administrators to consult the public aboutproposed rulemaking activities across various agencies. The Federal Advisory Committee Act, whichimplicitly recognizes that expertise can lie outside the agency, recognizes the merits of seeking advicefrom citizens. But these solutions are only partial. The OG Initiative extends responsiveness moreradically by acknowledging that citizens must have information to hold agencies accountable and thedesirability of direct input in the decision making-processes taken by administrative agencies.

Thus, although e-democracy in political and e-government in administrative realms have been largelyseparated, it now appears OG brings these two spheres of activity together. But whether federal agencyattempts to implement open government are best viewed as e-democracy or e-governance, it seemsclear that these efforts take place in contexts that lack the conceptual frameworks and the performancebenchmarks for evaluating their success (see, e.g. [37]).

3. Transparency, participation, and collaboration

The idea of “open government” is animated by optimism over what can be accomplished politicallythrough the use of new technology; the term draws in part on the philosophy and methods of the“open source” programming movement in which users have access to, and can thus contribute to,the development of software code. Analogously, citizens with access to information, documents, andproceedings can become meaningful participants in government [36, p. xix]. The open source movementis characterized by its advocates as transparent, participative, and collaborative, but these terms alsorepresent political values with a substantial history in democratic theory, directly relevant to broadprocesses of citizen action related to voting and public policy choices, now also applied in the context ofroutine administrative actions within government bureaucracy. In our discussion below, we show howtransparency, participation, and collaboration, which relate directly to democratic theory, have becomeincreasingly relevant to administrative contexts.


3.1. Transparency

The relationships between information, transparency, and democracy are fundamental and basic.Information is essential to such basic democratic competencies as formulating preferences and opinions,testing choices, and participating in decision making [19,57]; without them a citizen is denied effectivevoice and the exercise of First Amendment rights to free speech [7]. Without information, it is similarlyimpossible for citizens to hold the governments they elect accountable to their collective will. Accordingto De Ferranti [21], transparency refers to the public availability and flow of “timely, comprehensive,relevant, high quality and reliable information concerning government activities” [21, p. 7]. Wherecitizens delegate authority for decision making, transparency is essential to providing a continuing basisfor consent. Transparency thus describes the extent to which government makes available the dataand documents the public needs in order to assess government action and exercise voice in decisionmaking [22]. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) enables federal agencies to negotiate between theright to know and justified needs for secrecy, giving citizens a mechanism for requesting information thathas otherwise not been released. The voluntary and routine disclosure of budgets, audits, policies, andexecutive actions is a basis for citizens to assess the efficacy of administrative action and make demandsabout public services that are provided by government; these acts coincidentally also generate pressurefor improved performance.

But it is worth noting, as has Fung [26], that transparency is not an unalloyed good. Maximizingtransparency, for example, may bring into sharp relief the ways in which government decision making isproblematic, without due regard for the goods and benefits that are produced along with these problems.He calls for “public accounting systems” that would enable citizens to provide ongoing feedback andbroader evaluations of government services.

Beyond its potential for fostering accountability and generating improved government performance,transparency has also been discussed as a means to other ends, such as for increasing legitimacy. AsCurtin and Meijer [15] point out, transparency may enhance the public’s willingness to accept institutionalstructures in a variety of ways: by clarifying how an authority structure has been constituted, bydemonstrating the concrete benefits of institutional actions, and by cultivating the belief that citizenshave a fair chance to influence institutional decisions and evaluate results, to name a few. These areempirical questions, of course; the extent to which transparency is related to its hypothesized objectiveshas yet to be fully established (see [29]).

3.2. Participation

Based on the model of the Athenian polis, the earliest form of democratic governance is participatorydemocracy, in which, through discussion and deliberation, citizens engage directly in decision makingabout their civic affairs [30]. In contrast to representative government, participatory democracy requiresindividuals to become more knowledgeable about the perspectives of others and the interests that underliethose perspectives [50] so they may deliberate more effectively. Opinion exchange takes place in a varietyof venues. For Habermas [27], the link between the public and democratic government is forged throughdiscourse in the “public sphere” that is, through the social intercourse that takes place between citizensdiscussing issues of common concern in a variety of public places – coffee houses, salons, and journalsof opinion. For communitarian democracy [1,20] and its contemporary analogues or extensions (e.g.,“strong democracy” [6]), this interaction takes place in neutral gathering places or “great good places” [43]where citizens meet as community members to discuss issues that sustain community life and build civic


commitment. Regardless of venue, the assumption is that all citizens have equal influence over decisionsultimately taken, and that they exert their influence under conditions of individual autonomy.

Applied to administrative agencies, public participation is the “process by which public concerns,needs, and values are incorporated into governmental and corporate decision making” [11, p. 7], aprocess that is democratically justified when it is acknowledged that decisions taken by administrativeagencies have a political character. Public participation has the potential to include diverse citizens’voices in the public policy process [18]; when traditionally excluded voices are included, policies may bedesigned that can help them overcome disadvantageous positions. Social equity is recognized as a coreobjective of public administration [24] and public participation is a means for achieving this objectiveby enabling citizens, “presently excluded from the political and economic processes, to be deliberatelyincluded in the future” [5, p. 216]. Public participation is also thought to yield concrete benefits forthe decision making at issue since different perspectives can help decision makers make more informeddecisions; citizens may know as well as bureaucrats, or perhaps even better because they deal with suchproblems more frequently, what options constitute desirable policy [34, p. 72].

Finally, like transparency, public participation has the potential to be assist contemporary governmentsaddress the issue of legitimacy [25]. Government action is considered legitimate if the public has goodreasons to support it. Public participation in government decision making can increase legitimacy byincorporating the public interests in the decision making process; support comes from the recognitionthat the government is responsive to the interest of the public, rather than organized interest groups [25].

Although public participation in administrative decision making is acknowledged to hold considerablepotential, there is also considerable evidence to suggest it is not always successful [34]. Participationvaries according to (1) who participates, (2) how participants exchange information and make decisions,(3) the link between public participation and decisionmaking [25]. It is not the case thatmore participationis always better; a contingency approach recognizes different levels of participation are more or lessdesirable depending on the characteristics of the policy process and the goals pursued. The extent andkind of public participation should depend on the potential contribution to be made and the potentialadverse consequences that may ensue [10, p. 533].

3.3. Collaboration

Unlike transparency and participation, collaboration has not traditionally been directly associated withdemocratic political theory. Instead, Noveck [40] argues that collaboration is “a form of democraticparticipation” [40, p. 19] that differs in important ways from traditional participative and deliberativepractices, which often take place in circumstances disconnected from decision making. While there arebenefits to ensuring that diverse viewpoints are incorporated into government action (as we have seenabove), she argues that collaboration brings individuals with expertise together with government decisionmakers to create solutions that will be implemented.

This approach to collaboration finds its foundation in recent public administration theory as collabora-tive public management, the “process of facilitating and operating in multiorganizational arrangementsin order to remedy problems that cannot be solved – or solved easily – by single organizations” [38, p. 33]and in analogous models such as “new governance” [51, p. 8]. Collaboration helps governments address“wicked” public problems that lack easy solutions and require “a capacity to work across organizationalboundaries, to think holistically and to involve the public” [9].

Like participation, collaboration can potentially enhance the effectiveness of government, but it does soby viewing impartiality, expertise, resources, discipline, and time to make public decisions as resources


distributed in society that can be incorporated into policy processes. Collaboration calls for differentsectors of society to work together, recognizing that citizens possess complementary information that canbe used to solve public problems [51] and that collaboration may build social capital needed for citizensto play “value adding” roles [53]. The potential of collaborative approaches is greatly enhanced bynew technologies that give rise to permeable “networked” structures allowing people to connect acrossorganizational boundaries [38].

However, collaboration has also been criticized in the public administration literature. For instance,reliance on third party actors has generated the image of the hollow state to describe governments thatbecome distanced from the services they deliver [46]. Additionally, holding these new participantsresponsible for their actions may present accountability issues [45]. There is limited understanding ofthe impact of collaboration on program outcomes and a generalized assumption that more collaborationis always desired [38]. But collaboration is desirable to the extent that it can achieve its potential andlead to more effective problem solving. Thus, like transparency and participation, according to Noveckcollaboration “is a means to an end. Hence the emphasis is not on participation for its own sake buton inviting experts, loosely defined as those with expertise about a problem, to engage in informationgathering, information evaluation and measurement, and the development of specific solutions forimplementation.” [40, p. 39]

4. The public value framework

It should be clear from the prior discussion that transparency, participation, and collaboration are bestviewed as policies that enable citizens to enact various roles as citizens. Thus, transparency is not anend citizens pursue for its own sake. Citizens may desire their government to be transparent, but that islargely because something else is at stake: Information and actions must be transparent so that citizenscan scrutinize and assess the concrete outcomes of government action. Similarly, participation for themere sake of participating is an empty and alienating exercise; instead, citizens participate in order toproduce government action that responds to and reflects their input in meaningful ways. Collaborationonly makes sense where participants can contribute useful expertise, and substantive decisions are underconsideration. But although these policies may not be ends in themselves, when implemented, they mustbe genuinely enacted. Citizens must trust that these processes have not been co-opted in the serviceof other politicized agendas. At the same time, as we have pointed out, it is also not the case thatmore transparency, participation, or collaboration is necessarily beneficial. Instead, care must be takento determine the ways and the occasions in which these processes are undertaken. Thus, in the faceof these complexities, metrics that merely quantify how many datasets are available or how frequentlyopportunities to participate or collaborate are presented cannot be taken as unequivocal indicators thatopen government has been successful.

We suggest that when transparency, participation and collaboration are meaningful, it is because theyenable people to pursue their objectives. If that is true, what are these objectives? Below we proposethat the “public value” framework provides a way to determine the value of government activities and todo so from multiple stakeholder perspectives, not just a “citizen” viewpoint.

4.1. Public value in public administration

The public value perspective, introduced by Moore [39], assumes that administrative organizationsmake decisions that are inevitably political, and argues that managers must therefore determine how best


to make such decisions. Just as privately owned economic organizations create “private value” for theirowners, Moore proposes that public organizations create “public value” for citizens and a wide rangeof other stakeholders. Private value is created when goods and services are bought through transactionsthat produce a profit; it is reasonably easy to discern and measure. Public value, on the other hand,is the product of governmentally-produced benefits, produced when market mechanisms are unable toguarantee their equitable distribution. Part of public value is derived from the direct usefulness of suchbenefits; another part is derived from the fairness and equitability of their production and distribution,and meets citizens’ requirements for “properly ordered and productive public institutions” [39, p. 53].

This perspective makes clear that efficiency and effectiveness measures are not necessarily the onlyor even the principal way that government programs or services might be assessed. As Moore putsit [39, p. 38] “In the end none of the concepts of ‘politically neutral competence,’ ‘policy analysis’ and‘program evaluation,’ or ‘customer satisfaction’ can finally banish politics from its preeminent place indefining what is valuable to produce in the public sector. Politics remains the final arbiter of public valuejust as private consumption decisions remain the final arbiter of private value.” Citizens have individualperspectives on the relative worth of governmental activities, but ultimately whether a government actioncreates public value is a collective judgment. The extent of value perceived is likely to vary based uponinterest group perspectives, location in the hierarchy, and time period. Since the desirability of agencyaction is not derived from legislative mandate, public managers must attend actively to perceptions ofpublic value produced by agency programs and services. Moore offers considerable advice about howbest to manage such processes.

However, he does not offer a systematic method for analyzing public value. Since financial metricssuch as efficiency, profit, and productivity cannot be wholly transported to this context, we must findanalogous methods for analyzing public value. To address this problem, Cresswell and colleagues [12,13] designed a conceptual scheme for linking the concrete interests of multiple stakeholders to specificgovernment activities in the context of ICT investments. Below, we present this framework as we haveapplied it to open government; we then discuss the considerations that gave rise to the framework andassumptions regarding its future use.

4.2. Public value impacts

Public value, in the most general sense, focuses our attention on the individual and societal interests thatare served by particular institutional forms and actions of government. We can speak in broad terms aboutthose interests, but to be most useful the analysis of public value must center on particular stakeholdergroups and their interests. The distribution of value across multiple stakeholders will vary according totheir particular interests and expectations for government; some will benefit from a government action,somewill lose. Past literature and governmentdeclarations link OG initiatives to the all-inclusive categoryof “citizens,” missing the variety of interests and benefits across stakeholders. Instead, we treat eachgovernment action as potentially presenting diverse values to multiple stakeholder groups both insideand outside the organization.

The cornerstone of the public value rationale lies in the link between government action and themultiple types of public value that can accrue. Public value types distinguish between the intrinsic valueof government as a societal asset and the substantive value of government actions and policies that deliverspecific benefits directly to individuals, groups, or organizations. Public value can be described in termsof six general types that capture the range of possible results of government in the ways of interest here.

– Economic – impacts on current or future income, asset values, liabilities, entitlements, or otheraspects of wealth or risks to any of the above.


– Political – impacts on a person’s or group’s influence on government actions or policy, or their rolein political affairs, influence in political parties or prospects for public office.

– Social – impacts on family or community relationships, social mobility, status, and identity.– Strategic – impacts on person’s or group’s economic or political advantage or opportunities, goals,

and resources for innovation or planning.– Quality of life – impacts on individual and household health, security, satisfaction, and general

well-being– Ideological – impacts on beliefs, moral or ethical commitments, alignment of government ac-

tions/policies or social outcomes with beliefs, or moral or ethical positions.– Stewardship – impacts on the public’s view of government officials as faithful stewards or guardians

of the value of the government in terms of public trust, integrity, and legitimacy.

Of these, the first five types are outcomes related to the substantive private interests of individuals orgroups. The remaining two types are related to intrinsic, societal and democratic outcomes. The publicvalue of stewardship results from greater integrity (including fairness and equitability), responsiveness,and legitimacy of government leading to increased trust and satisfaction with the government overall.Ideological public value aligns government action with moral and ethical preferences or beliefs.

From identifying these seven basic types of value impacts, we move to considering issues relatedto how value is created. Value is produced by “value generating mechanisms”; identifying thesemechanisms allows us to specify the means, or pathways, by which a government action may be relatedto the production of one or more public values. According to our framework, actions to operationalizetransparency, participation, and collaboration belong within this group of value generators. Taken as awhole, the set of value generators consists of:

– Efficiency – obtaining increased outputs or goal attainment with the same resources, or obtaining thesame outputs or goals with lower resource consumption.

– Effectiveness – increasing the quality of the desired outcome.– Intrinsic enhancements – changing the environment or circumstances of a stakeholder in ways that

are valued for their own sake.– Transparency – access to data or information about the actions of government officials or operation

of government programs that enhances accountability or influence on government.– Participation – frequency and intensity of direct involvement in decision making about operation,

policies, or actions of government or in selection of officials.– Collaboration – frequency or duration of activities in which more than one set of stakeholders share

responsibility or authority for decisions about operation, policies, or actions of government.

Connecting a value type with a value generating mechanism makes clear how a government programis expected to produce one or more public values. For example, an IT investment in putting licenseapplication and renewals online may increase efficiency or effectiveness and yield strategic or financialpublic value for stakeholders that use such licenses.

Transparent, participative, or collaborative actions taken by government may, when operationalizedeffectively, have the effect of enabling a citizen to derive substantive economic, social, political orstrategic values and/or intrinsic value related to government itself. For example, when provided withenvironmental information (with transparency as the enabling value generating mechanism) a citizenmay derive multiple types of value. In this case, a citizen who acquires information about a toxicchemical release in the neighborhood may derive social or quality of life benefits for his/her family andthe community, but may also gain greater trust in the stewardship of a government agency that provides


such information. Conversely, it is also possible that other stakeholders will derive negative publicvalue from this release of information. The same citizen who learns of a toxic chemical release maysue the business allegedly responsible, resulting in negative public value for that business stakeholder.It is also possible that a group of internal governmental stakeholders may accrue positive political andstrategic value by releasing the information because it meets an open government requirement; anotherset of internal stakeholders may see that as negative political impact. Therefore, determining the valueof any government action requires analysis of multiple stakeholder perspectives so that both positiveand negative effects are identified and understood. With the information generated through this carefulanalysis, we argue that more informed decisions can be made about open government initiatives.

4.3. Background and assumptions of the public value framework

The public value framework assumes the value of government action is best determined from theperspective of the citizens served. Historically, as government IT spending has increased, a persistentproblem has been the need to represent the value of these expenditures in terms of expected return.Unlike private organizations that represent return in financial or economic metrics, we assume thatpublic managers can best justify IT expenditures in terms of value to citizens. In the original formulationof our public value framework [12,13], Moore’s formulation was elaborated in the ways described abovethrough the process of conducting five case studies by staff members of the Center for Technology inGovernment (including three of the current co-authors) working in consultation with public managersresponsible for IT investments in the US (two separate cases), Israel, Canada, and Austria.

At that time, the goal was to create a conceptual method for assessing return on investment (ROI) thatcould be applied to virtually any IT expenditure and that focused directly on identifying citizen benefits.Each case study examined benefits from IT investments and the possible mechanisms generating them.The analysts considered the links between particular organizational business goals, implemented ITsystems, changes in performance, and public returns. This produced a conceptual framework thatfocused on (1) characterizing public return in terms of types of value that might be obtained by citizensfrom IT investment, and (2) identifying specific enabling mechanisms – public value generators – thatappeared to be responsible for producing value. The public value types were intended to constitute a basic,if not comprehensive, set of categories describing benefits that citizens could derive from governmentinvestment in IT.

Since, as we have noted, the OG initiative is highly dependent on information technology, our researchteam sought more recently to update and apply this public value framework to open government. Weincorporated the six public value types from the original formulation and added a seventh (quality of life).Given the theoretical discussion above, which suggests that the processes of transparency, participation,and collaboration should be viewed as means toward other goals rather than ends in themselves, wedescribe them as enabling mechanisms, similar to efficiency, effectiveness, and intrinsic enhancements,which had been derived through the case studies. Two notes of caution are relevant here: First, theenabling mechanisms, which might also be viewed as anything IT can do to generate a value, may bestbe conceived as an open-ended category, since there is seemingly no end to innovations produced throughIT. Second, transparency, participation, or collaboration may be pursued for their own sake (although,given our theory, we do not recommend doing so), and when that happens, these qualities may be seenas embedded in the larger value of stewardship.

The public value framework is rooted in an analysis of specific stakeholder groups. This is becausethe benefits and costs of government action differ among citizens based on their interests vis-a-vis


Fig. 1. Steps in using the public value assessment tool.

any particular government program. This seems especially true for the open government context,which encompasses a wide variety of citizen stakeholders, civic advocacy and watchdog organizations,entrepreneurs seeking to use government data for business purposes, established businesses, etc.

Finally, as originally conceived, the PV framework was intended as a conceptual tool to be used bypublic managers to help them think through the process of proposing and justifying IT expenditures.Although there are causal dynamics embedded in the formulation (the effects of public value generatorson resulting individual values, as benefits or costs to stakeholders) they involve complex, non-linearrelationships among diverse stakeholder groups and potential feedback loops, which we have not yetattempted to model quantitatively.

Thus, no effort has been made to test this framework predictively; instead, we have developed a “publicvalue assessment tool,” in the form of an online workbook application, which is intended to guide publicmanagers through these conceptual processes according to steps described in Fig. 1 and to record theproducts of their analyses. We are currently pilot testing this approach among government OG plannersto determine the extent to which this conceptual process provides relevant and helpful guidance.

OG planners are asked to consider each of their OG initiatives, preferably prior to deployment, interms of identified stakeholders served by their unit. The goal of steps 1 and 2 is to link each OGinitiative to the specific stakeholders it serves. Thus, the analysis requires a relatively complete inventoryof stakeholders for a government unit. Further, the analysis assumes that planners situate their initiativeswithin the unit’s existing mission and priorities. In step 3, OG planners are asked to identify for eachstakeholder group the particular public values that are relevant, as benefits or costs, to each OG initiative.The workbook enables planners to visually display the magnitude of the benefit/cost.

From there, OG planners are asked to determine for each initiative and related stakeholders theparticular enabling/change mechanism(s) thought to be the means by which the value is achieved (step 4)


for that stakeholder group. In step 5, planners are asked to consider the range of public values expectedacross stakeholder groups in a summary assessment of each initiative. No effort is made to reduce thisdata to singular scores; instead, the workbook enables planners to compare summary assessments acrossOG plans in a “portfolio analysis,” which permits them to visually assess their portfolios by proposal orby stakeholders.

Thus, OG planners may benefit by using this approach to plan, design, introduce, and qualitativelyassess a portfolio of open government initiatives. The selection and design of open government initiativescan be enhanced by a clear understanding of who is served by a particular initiative, by specifying whatkinds of value an initiative seeks to create, and by recognizing the value generating actions that arerequired to achieve benefit. This is a recipe for clear-minded planning and design that we trust willimprove the progress of open government planning. Planners can conduct their analyses by initiative,asking what stakeholders and values are targeted by initiatives in their portfolios, thus insuring thatinitiatives each have a discernible audience and anticipated outcomes. They can also analyze theirportfolio of OG initiatives by stakeholder, asking what initiatives serve each stakeholder group and inwhat ways they will derive value, thus insuring that the agency is addressing the needs of those segmentsof the public they are mandated to serve. They may also derive a deeper understanding of the way inwhich the enabling actions designed to operationalize transparency, participation and collaboration arerelated to the particular benefits (or costs) achieved for stakeholder groups.

Ultimately, this approach suggests that initiatives are best conceived and justified from the perspectivesof initiative stakeholders, rather than an undifferentiated public or other government administrators. Thispresents new challenges to public managers in understanding the preferences of citizen stakeholders, asothers have recognized [2,32] and in developing the skills required to manage conversations in whichpublic values are expressed, defined, and come to acquire shared meaning [3,47] Indeed, public valuepractice more generally requires that public managers cultivate new forms of dialogue, deliberation, andrelationship with citizen stakeholders.

5. Conclusion

The public value perspective in general has generated considerable interest by practitioners andacademics alike. Viewed by some as a new paradigm with the potential to solve some of the puzzlesthat have plagued traditional or new public management paradigms, the meanings of public value, itsplace in the political process, and its status as an empirical theory, a normative standard, or both arestill controversial topics [3,42]. In the current open government context, it is noteworthy that somehave argued that public value management is rooted in the processes of dialogue and exchange that arerequired by contemporary approaches to networked governance [55].

Similarly, our public value approach to open government is a work in process. However, as e-government researchers, we believe that this effort is vitally important. As our analysis has shown, ourfield’s conceptualizations of e-government have roughly mirrored those advanced by elected leaders,rather than serving as inspiration to those who seek to lead. While we have included democraticenhancements in our e-government typologies, they have received little development. It is remarkableto see the e-government aspirations of the Obama Administration following the lead of the open sourcemovement, rather than the field of e-government. As researchers, we must be proactive in helping federalgovernment leaders develop, implement, and assess the open government vision.

This is all the more important since the nature of transparency, participation, and collaboration is soeasily misunderstood. These open government principles are easily operationalized. However, doing so


without reference to value carries the risk that such actions will be empty scaffolding. Transparency, forexample, will not be achieved through the availability or mere downloading of data sets. The data setsmust be reliable and valid; most crucially, they must enable citizens to do something they find valuableand important. If not, transparency is just another empty promise, and will contribute to growingcynicism within the electorate. Similarly, participation and collaboration must be meaningful, directedtoward goals that are carefully defined, acknowledged by ample government feedback, and the citizeninput they generate represented in outcomes that are visible to stakeholders in the decisions and the valueproduced.

At the same time, open government reconciles the divergent paths of e-democracy and e-governm-ent. While transparency, participation, and collaboration take time and resources, they bear the promiseof ultimately improving policy performance – the historic focus of e-government – by creating sharedunderstandings of current performance and generating pressure to improve, increasing the pool ofapplicable ideas, tapping into new sources of expertise, and building civic capacity. All these mayultimately turn out to be the key to concrete improvements in policy outcomes and public services.

But achieving such outcomes inevitably requires changes in the structure and organization of govern-ment. Fountain [23] has observed that such structural changes rarely materialize through e-governmentinitiatives. Instead, technology enactment all too often reproduces existing rules, norms, and powerrelations, despite the innovative capabilities of new technologies. The promise of open government is toprovide a source of pressure that counteracts these tendencies, a promise that may be fulfilled providedthat open government changes the nature of relationships between stakeholders and government. Thecreation of public value may be the best possible argument for stimulating and justifying such structuralchanges.

Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work partially supported by the US National Science Foundation underGrant No. 0956356. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in thismaterial are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National ScienceFoundation.

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Documents

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