Smart government, citizen participation and open data

The use of Information Technologies in government (or e-government) has evolved during the last few years to make the interactions between government and citizens (G2C), government and businesses (G2B), and inter-agency relationships (G2G) more effective, democratic and transparent 1,6,8. Moreover, in the most recent years we have observed two important trends with an impact in all these interactions. On the one hand, governments around the world have engaged in a movement to open data with open licenses and in easier to re-use formats. On the other hand, technology ubiquity is contributing to the production of impressive amounts of data that have the potential to help us better understand complex social problems as well as to improve government relationships with citizens, private organizations, NGOs and other governments. Both trends together with a more extensive use of information technologies have been referred to as smart government or intelligent government. Smart government is considered as one of the key trends that governments have to follow for the next 10–15 years 7. The concept of a smart community refers to the use of information and communication technologies by local governments and cities to better interact with their citizens, taking advantage of all available data to solve important problems 2. However, in order to deliver the expected values, governments need not only to create new services to their citizens based on these technologies in order to improve their quality of life, but also to engage citizens in this new set of services. Hence, there are two main components to be considered: the extensive use of technology by governments, which we refer to as smart government, and the extensive use of technology by citizens to interact with governments, which we will refer to as citizens’ engagement.