Beyond the Portal: Increasing Citizen Understanding of OGD with Storytelling

The open government data (OGD) movement claims to contribute to transparency and increased citizen understanding of government action. However, the literature so far shows these goals are not being reached, as ‘common’ (non-expert) citizens fail to access and understand OGD. This research makes an empirical contribution to this debate through a design experiment in the form of a field lab with a governmental agency, data visualization experts, and non-expert citizens in the Netherlands. In this field lab, the current practice of disseminating OGD by a regional water authority on the issue of drought was redesigned based on non-expert citizens’ needs. Our findings show that non-expert citizens prefer data storytelling techniques over OGD portals or traditional OGD visualizations such as graphs or dashboards. This is informative for the current shift from OGD geared at expert users, to OGD geared at fostering effective transparency with non-expert users. We also build on existing research to develop new evaluation criteria for OGD visualizations, and find that completeness and usability seem more important than objectivity in disseminating OGD with non-expert citizens when communicating about complex policy problems.