Understanding motivations of citizens to reuse open data

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Open data promises to provide cost-effective and, more importantly, promising grass root ways to generate public sector innovations in e-government, e.g., in finding better bottom-up solutions to various challenges and needs of civic communities. For the last decade since the time when the concept of the open government data was initiated by the Obama administration in early 2009, a plethora of open data-driven projects have been proposed and advanced all over the planet in a wide range of political and socioeconomic niches of life. Many of the projects are aimed at providing their services on a non-commercial basis and are often developed and promoted by citizens for citizens themselves in a clearly peer-to-peer manner. Furthermore, only a small number of open data-driven solutions such as mobile applications and web-based platforms developed by civic communities have been supported from funds provided by government, private and non-governmental stakeholders, for example, as part of various app contests, hackathons, etc. In addition, civic developers often have to rely on their own resources and rarely on funds raised by other members of civic communities. In this regard, it seems interesting to look at key factors such as political and socioeconomic conditions and other driving forces that help to facilitate and motivate these civic developers to reuse open data, challenges they usually have to face and cost-effective strategies they apply in order to stay afloat and be socioeconomically stable in advancing these open data-driven projects and initiatives in self-sustaining ways.

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