Compliance with open government data policies: An empirical assessment of Italian local public administrations

Open government is emerging as a core issue for increasing, on the one hand, participation of citizens, and, on the other hand, accountability, transparency, and the capability of delivering digital services by Public Administrations, with a consequent interest into public and social value as final outcomes. However, most of the open government initiatives actually concern the provision of public data under an open license and in an open and accessible format. From a policy as well as from a research point of view, open government raises a set of questions about how to manage and evaluate their quality, also considering the compliance with enforced legal frameworks, if any available focused specifically on open government issues. Thus, the paper discusses a quality-based framework for open government data compliance assessment, made up of quality dimensions and a set of criteria contributing to the measurement of a compliance index. The framework is then applied for the evaluation of the open government data initiatives of a sample of local public administrations in Italy.