Governmental and public organisations have historically been generating and accumulating vast amounts of data which could provide many potential benefits for society and national economies. One example of an important dataset is accounts payable providing information about purchases and expenditures of the governmental sector. Academic research in the area of open data is rather new and fragmented. There is a gap in understanding socio-economic impact of open government data ex post at organisational level. This research aims to understand what kind of socio-economic impact a municipality gains by publishing accounts payable as open data, and how municipalities perceive the major benefits, challenges and risks related to open publishing of this dataset. For analysis, we use the example of Swedish municipalities that are already publishing or preparing to publish accounts payable dataset as open data. We discuss costs related to open data initiative, and benefits related to open publishing of analysed dataset. We also provide more insights into benefits and challenges perceived by municipalities in relation to open publishing of accounts payable.

The objectives of this study were to analyse: (i) efficiency gains that a municipality would gain by publishing accounts payable data as open data; and (ii) socio-economic effects with a major focus on democracy aspects. Summarising, we can state that potential efficiency gains related to opening accounts payable data can be significant, which was also confirmed by previous studies. Based on experience of Swedish municipalities publishing accounts payable as open data, we have made an estimation of potential efficiency gains due to reduced time to answer inquiries coming from citizens, journalists, and organisations. Based on these assessments, the potential efficiency gains may reach approximately 2 million kr per year for large municipalities. Additionally, availability of open data on accounts payable may result in further reduction of time needed to handle an inquiry due to opportunity to direct a person to thee open data file, a more exact and specific question formulation, and reduced number of inquiries. It was found that democratic aspects in publishing accounts payable were perceived as more important than potential time savings and efficiency gains. This is especially important for smaller municipalities, which do not get that many inquiries and cannot expect the same level of savings effect. Democracy aspects are closely related to transparency, openness, and opportunity to push procurement prices down. All this leads to even greater savings for municipalities. Another important aspect is finding mistakes and discovery of corruption cases. Elimination of such cases in the future would result in considerable savings at national level. One of the important findings of this research is the fact that municipalities already publishing open data do not see any related risks, while municipalities that are only preparing to publish open data see a number of risks related to open data publishing. The major concerns are related to confidentiality, privacy, and secrecy risks, unclear quality of data, and increased workload for some units. We also make a number of recommendations from different perspectives, which could accelerate the process of open data publishing. This analysis was carried out by Tatjana Apanasevic from RISE Research Institutes of Sweden as a part of Nationell Skalning Öppna Data (NSÖD) project, financed by Vinnova. The analysis is based on primary data collected through interviews with seven municipalities (the City of Gothenburg, the City of Lidingö, Skövde, Varberg, Karlskrona, Uppsala, and Skellefteå), a service provider, consultants working with open data, and three (data) journalists.

The increasing collection and usage of data and data analytics has prompted development of Data Labs. These labs are (ideally) a way for multiple beneficiaries to make use of the same data in ways that are value-generating for all. However, establishing data labs requires the mobilization of various infrastructural elements, such as beneficiaries, offerings and needed analytics talent, all of which are ambiguous and uncertain. The aim of this paper is to examine how such beneficiaries can be identified and understood for the nascent Swedish space data lab. The paper reports on the development of persona descriptions that aim to support and represent the needs of key beneficiaries of earth observation data. Our main results include three thorough persona descriptions that represent the lab’s respective beneficiaries and their distinct characteristics. We discuss the implications of the personas on addressing the infrastructural challenges, as well as the lab’s design. We conclude that personas provide emerging data labs with relatively stable beneficiary archetypes that supports the further development of the other infrastructure components. More research is needed to better understand how these persona descriptions may evolve, as well as how they may influence the continuous development process of the space data lab.

This paper discusses Digital Environmental Stewardship as an analytical framework that can help HCI scholarship to understand, design, and assess sociotechnical interventions concerned with sustainable waste management practices. Drawing on environmental studies, we outline key concepts of environmental stewardship - namely actors, capacity, and motivations - to unpack how different initiatives for handling waste are organised, both through grassroots and top-down interventions, and through varying sociotechnical configurations. We use these dimensions to analyse three different cases of waste management that illustrate how actions of care for the environment are ecologically organised, and what challenges might hinder them beyond -or besides- behavioural motivations. We conclude with a discussion on the orientation to action that the suggested framework provides, and its role in understanding, designing and assessing digital technologies in this domain. We argue that examining how stewardship actions fold into each other helps design sociotechnical interventions for managing waste from within a relational perspective.

In recent years, the e-scooter has gained exceptional worldwide adoption, and their hybrid vehicle design has placed them in a legislative void. To this end, many cities are developing local regulations to govern and follow-up e-scooter operations within their jurisdiction. As e-scooters are equipped with hardware like SIM cards, GPS sensors, and accelerometers, the vehicles can both collect and act on digital information. Increasingly, cities thus draw on these capabilities using the Mobility Data Specification (MDS) as a soft digital infrastructure to e.g., express local regulations and collect operator data for compliance purposes. This paper uses interview data from European and U.S. cities, e-scooter operators, and systems integrators to provide an overview of the history and components of MDS. The paper also presents cities’ current uses and emerging challenges regarding using MDS for regulation, compliance monitoring, as well as data analytics for physical infrastructure planning.

Many contemporary firms and public agencies seek to engage external third-party developers to supply complementary applications. However, this type of development sometimes occurs without organizational consent, which creates problems for subjected organizations at both the technical and organizational levels. In this thesis, I have developed a theoretical perspective called open platform emulation. This perspective builds on emulation logics, where designers use an external model as a basis for developing compatible platform capabilities superior to the original model. In this thesis, this model has been external unsanctioned development. In open platform emulation, such capabilities include governance decisions enabling coherence with previously proven solutions, the flexibility to accommodate new development trajectories, and strategies for applying openness to a digital resource. The means to achieve these capabilities involves design rules’ architecture, interfaces, and integration protocols, which convey the capabilities to third-party developers. This way, a platform owner can draw on governance and architectural configurations to emulate self-resourcing behavior through the platform core. I generated the contributions from this thesis by materializing open platform emulation in a clinical setting. More specifically, I used action design research (ADR) together with the Swedish Transport Administration (STA). Starting in early 2012, I led a platform initiative that, in collaboration with the STA, sought to emulate self-resourcing to design an open platform. Here, I conducted two full ADR cycles that resulted in a currently active production platform used by both the STA and external third-party developers. Before this engagement, I also conducted studies of related phenomena within the Swedish public transport industry, and I have continued to follow the STA’s platform trajectory since its release in 2014. The theoretical contributions from this thesis include design principles that seek to guide the designers of open platforms in situations where digital resources are subject to self-resourcing. These design principles cover both product and process aspects throughout the open platform’s developmental trajectory. Also, I offer additional theoretical implications based on this work. These include extensions to current theories on open platforms, different types of platform emulation, an enunciated influence response to outlaw innovation, and methodological implications for guided emergence in ADR.

Standards are considered an essential means to facilitate value creation from open data. Despite this importance, we find that empirical studies of open data standards have not been conducted in proportion to its importance. In particular, the literature has insofar been silent about why specific standards are chosen and how these standards are implemented. To this end, we report from an action research project with the Swedish public transport industry, where open data standards were both chosen and implemented. Consistent with the literature, we find standards were selected based on expected increased attractivity for re-users. Also, and more surprisingly, we found that open data standards were chosen as a means to harness resources in adjacent digital ecosystems. Finally, our findings convey that implementing open data standards may hamper the possibility to publish datasets, with its original qualities.

In this research-in-progress paper, we present findings from the diagnosing phase of a Canonical Action Research endeavour, together with the Swedish public transport industry. In our investigation, we found that the Swedish public transport industry historically has been able to create substantial value from taking a peripheral position in existing digital ecosystems. Also, we found several types of digital ecosystems that potentially would create future value, using open data from the public transport industry. These ecosystem types are incumbent digital platforms, open source software frameworks, and multi-provider open data ecosystems. This finding is novel to current discussions, as our results point to the paradoxical necessity of taking a more peripheral position towards these nascent digital ecosystems in order to harness their value. This finding implies a need for data providers to develop capabilities that enable such ecosystem participation. Our emerging results suggest that such capabilities include complementary resources, input control compliance, IP waivers, open community practices adoption, and open data boundary-spanners.

The enrolment of third-party developers is essential to leverage the creation and evolution of data ecosystems. When such complementary development takes place without any organizational consent, however, it causes new social and technical problems to be solved. In this paper, we advance platform emulation as a theoretical perspective to explore the nature of such problem-solving in the realm of open platforms. Empirically, our analysis builds on a 10-year action design research effort together with a Swedish authority. Its deliberate change agenda was to transform unsolicited third-party development into a sanctioned data ecosystem, which led to a live open platform that is still in production use. Theoretically, we synthesize and extend received theory on open platforms and offer novel product and process principles for this class of digital platforms.

Connected vehicles generate new data streams that present promising opportunities for policymakers to monitor and learn from events and behavior. To explore what we can learn from how public entities leverage ubiquitous data streams for policy development and enforcement, we draw on a case study of the standard Mobility Data Specification (MDS) and its use by cities to regulate E-scooter operators. Our findings suggest that (1) the richness of real-time data changes the speed of policy revision, (2) data access enables moving some micro-decisions to the edge, and (3) policy will be formulated as fixed or flexible with different amendment rules.

Stereotypes regarding ageing and the use of technology have an impact on how older adults perceive themselves as users of technology. Purchasing groceries online and using tablets for communication are two digital services that have been implemented in a number of municipalities in Sweden. For both these services, choices have been made with respect to how to implement the solutions and how older adults should be introduced to the technology. This work is based on interviews with personnel within one of the municipalities. The participants were asked about the introduction and implementation of the technology, about their expectations, and about how they and the older adults perceived the introduction and the usage. The interviews revealed no strong negative attitudes towards older adults as technology users. Among the personnel engaged coworkers could be found, but the importance of having enough time to engage the older adults was also highlighted. © 2021, The Author(s)

To increase sustainability in future energy systems, both technical and social measures must be taken. Microgrid communities offer local balancing of supply and demand, while also integrating the community as an active part of the energy system. This study investigates two cases of microgrid communities; how they were realized and what wider effects they offered its communities and other stakeholders. The study shows that the microgrid collaboration between community and utility offers a new organizational division that can overcome the traditional locked-in position of the utility. This brings forward communities as system-active participants and a sustainably beneficial energy system for the future. © 2022 The Author(s)