Identifying the Evolution of Open Government Data Initiatives and Their User Engagement

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 or web forms, and some of the user experiences are reported directly in the 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 X (formerly Twitter): a forum used by all types of stakeholders and publicly available for consistent analysis. This work proposes a methodology for analysing the evolution of Open Government Data initiatives and their user engagement along a temporal period. First, a set of variables are collected to describe the main features of Open Data initiatives and their associated social network activity. Then, to analyse these collected data from a multidimensional and temporal perspective, we apply the well-known technique of self-organizing maps to find hidden correlations between the status of different initiatives in the analysed period. Finally, as the number of map nodes is still too big to identify clear levels of maturity, a clustering algorithm is applied to group initiatives with a similar evolution status. The feasibility of this methodology has been tested by analysing 27 European Open Government Data portals between 2017 and 2021.