GOVINF-01223; No.

of pages: 13; 4C:

Government Information Quarterly xxx (2017) xxx–xxx

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Government Information Quarterly

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/govinf

A longitudinal cross-sector analysis of open data portal service capability:

The case of Australian local governments
Akemi Takeoka Chatfield a,⁎, Christopher G. Reddick b
a
School of Computing and Information Technology, Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences, University of Wollongong, Australia
b
Department of Public Administration, College of Public Policy, The University of Texas at San Antonio, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: While open government partnerships and open government data initiatives around the world have proliferated
Received 26 October 2016 in practice, empirical research is required to better understand open data policy and open data portal capability
Received in revised form 15 January 2017 which would spur meaningful citizen engagement towards co-production of open services innovation through
Accepted 10 February 2017
open data reuse. Specifically, relatively little has been empirically investigated about open data portal as sup-
Available online xxxx
ply-side service capabilities at the local government level. In this longitudinal research on twenty open data por-
Keywords:
tals in Australia's largest cities, cross-sector analysis results find large variation in open data portal service
Longitudinal cross-sector analysis capabilities, which are measured by open data policy intensity, open data provision, data format variety, and en-
Open data portal trepreneurial data services, including analytics tools, data modeling, and hackathon idea competitions. Longitu-
Service capability dinal cross-sector analysis results also find the important roles played by open data policy and dedicated open
Open data data portal investment as predictors of open data portal service capability improvements over time.
Big data © 2017 Published by Elsevier Inc.
Data analytics
Open innovation
Open data policy intensity
Citizens/portal users

1. Introduction
Open government data (OGD) has been seen as new mechanisms for
achieving government transparency, civic engagement, and new forms of
collaboration for open innovation which were primary goals of the Open
Government Directive of the former Obama administration (U.S.
Executive Office, 2009). Many other governments throughout the world
have also implemented OGD initiatives (Janssen, Charalabidis, &
Zuiderwijk, 2012; Mergel & Desouza, 2013; Kassen, 2013; Zuiderwijk &
Janssen, 2014; Conradie & Choenni, 2014; Meijer, Conradie, & Choenni,
2014; Luna-Reyes, Bertot, & Mellouli, 2014; Veljković, Bogdanović-Dinić,
& Stoimenov, 2014; Jetzek, Avital, & Björn-Andersen, 2014; Open
Government Partnership, 2016). The concept of OGD underscores the
recognition of OGD as valuable tangible or intangible resources at the
government's disposal (Open Government Working Group, 2007;
Alanazi & Chatfield, 2012).
The transformative potential of big and open data is notable for en-
hancing e-government services, openness, government transparency,
citizen engagement, and the interaction between governments, citizens,
and businesses (Bertot, Gorham, Jaeger, Sarin, & Choi, 2014). Moreover,
it is widely held that reuse of OGD has the potential to generate open
⁎ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: akemi@uow.edu.au (A.T. Chatfield), chris.reddick@utsa.edu
(C.G. Reddick).
innovation (Zuiderwijk, Janssen, & Davis, 2014; Susha, Grönlund, &
Janssen, 2015) and both economic and social values (Jetzek et al.,
2014) in the big data and linked open data ecosystems
(Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2014; Chen, Mao, & Liu, 2014). In the
short period, open government, open data, and open data policy re-
search streams have gained traction (Janssen et al., 2012; Lee & Kwak,
2012; Kassen, 2013; Evans & Campos, 2013; Luna-Reyes et al., 2014;
Zuiderwijk & Janssen, 2014; Veljković et al., 2014; Bates, 2014; Martin,
2014). The empowering potential of OGD realized at the local govern-
ment level may provide a useful platform for promoting proactive citi-
zen engagement (Kassen, 2013). Rather than an emergent view of
open data portal as a “public e-service” (Lněnička, 2015, p. 589), howev-
er, there exists a simplistic view of open data which equates the
government's open data provision with citizen engagement in reusing
open data to create benefits (Janssen et al., 2012). Hence, the promotion
of meaningful citizen engagement is one of the key challenges facing
open government initiatives (Ganapati & Reddick, 2012; Luna-Reyes &
Ae Chun, 2012; Evans & Campos, 2013).
Linders (2013) argues that while open data has made substantial
contributions towards realizing a more integrated vision of internation-
al aid delivery, much of the potential of open data remains unexplored.
Furthermore, Kassen (2013, p. 509) also argues that “in practice it is not
yet clear how the potential of the open data concept can be realized at
the local level as there has been no analysis of current projects thus
far.” To date, however, “a comprehensive analysis of the capabilities

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2017.02.004
0740-624X/© 2017 Published by Elsevier Inc.

Please cite this article as: Chatfield, A.T., & Reddick, C.G., A longitudinal cross-sector analysis of open data portal service capability: The case of
Australian local governments, Government Information Quarterly (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2017.02.004
2 A.T. Chatfield, C.G. Reddick / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
and potential of these initiatives is currently missing from the recent re-
search literature” (Petychakis, Vasileiou, Georgis, Mouzakitis, & Psarras,
2014, P. 34). There remains “the lack of a clear way to enable empirical
analysis and quantitative measurements of OGD initiatives (Carrasco &
Sobrepere, 2015, p. 633). Moreover, “little has been done to analyze
and prove the impact and accrued value of these OGD initiatives.”
(Ubaldi, 2013, p. 1) Finally, empirical research on open data portals at
the sub-national level is still lacking (Thorsby, Stowers, Wolslegal, &
Tunbuam, 2016).
To address the problem of these observed knowledge gaps, we raise
a central research question in this paper:
Do open data portal service capabilities differ in terms of open data pro-
vision, data format variety, open data policy intensity, and entrepre-
neurial data services, including analytics tools, hackathon
competitions, and data modeling?
In addressing the research question, we draw on prior OGD research
to empirically analyze services and characteristics of OGD portals. In this
paper, we define capability as the sophistication of open data service in
terms of the key characteristics of the portal listed above in our research
question. Prior research on open data portals identified the complexities
of the issues involved in the implementation and operation of dynami-
cally changing open data portals, including inadequate rewards for
sharing data (Reichman, Jones, & Schildhauser, 2011), inadequate
open data policy frameworks for big data (Bertot et al., 2014), data qual-
ity controls (Vetrò et al., 2016), data category standard (Thorsby et al.,
2016), stimulating civic apps development (Lee, Almirall, & Wareham,
2015), and local challenges (Kassen, 2013; Conradie & Choenni, 2014).
However, prior research including Thorsby et al. (2016) limited an anal-
ysis of open data portals to only one specific point of time. Since services
and characteristics of open data portals are dynamically changing over
time, we adopted a longitudinal cross-sector analysis methodology in
evaluating twenty Australian open data portals at the local government
level over two different time periods. In this paper, we aim to develop a
better understanding of supply-side open data portal service capabili-
ties which we view as essential for stimulating demand-side responses:
citizen engagement and citizen co-production of open innovation.
The structure of the remaining paper is as follows. The second sec-
tion presents theoretical foundation that aims to provide us a roadmap
for conducting a longitudinal cross-sector analysis of services and char-
acteristics of the operational open data portals. The third section de-
scribes the longitudinal research methodology adopted to answer the
central research question. The fourth section presents our key findings.
The fifth section presents our discussion and the sixth section presents
our conclusions and policy recommendations.
2. Theoretical foundation
In order to answer our research question on the supply-side open
data portal performance dynamics, we have drawn on prior research
on open data portals (Kassen, 2013; Attard, Orlandi, Scerri, & Auer,
2015; Thorsby et al., 2016), OGD (Bertot et al., 2014), data analytics
tools (Pauwels et al., 2009), and open data policy (Zuiderwijk &
Janssen, 2014) to identify salient services and characteristics of open
data portals developed and implemented by local governments for pro-
active publication of open datasets owned by their various departments.
2.1. Open data portal
An open data portal “allows users to publish, manage and consume
data in machine-readable formats, interlink their data with data pub-
lished elsewhere on the Web, publish applications built on top of the
data, and interact with other users” (Kostovski, Jovanovik, & Trajanov,
2012, p. 2). In contrast to research streams on OGD opportunities and
challenges and open data policy frameworks that have gained traction,
Please cite this article as: Chatfield, A.T., & Reddick, C.G., A longitudinal cross-sector analysis of open data portal service capability: The case of
Australian local governments, Government Information Quarterly (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2017.02.004
a comprehensive analysis of the capabilities and potential of these
open data portals is currently lacking in the research literature
(Petychakis et al., 2014). Moreover, open data portal development at
the local government level remains at an early stage even in the devel-
oped nations such as the U.S. (Thorsby et al., 2016).
Despite the early stage of development, empirical research on open
data portal analysis is emerging. Table 1 shows a summary of the
existing empirical research on open data portal analysis in terms of
the level of government, measures of open data portal services and
characteristics, and whether or not open data policy was evaluated.
Despite the early stage of development, Table 1 shows the recent re-
search interests in understanding open data portal capabilities through
an analysis of big data such as sensor data and geospatial data published
by local governments (Bui, 2015; Okamoto, 2016; Oliveira & Moreno,
2016). Table 1 also shows that the recent open data portal analysis re-
search, except Thorsby et al. (2016), fail to examine the presence/ab-
sence of open data policy as part of the open data portal characteristics.
An analysis of features and content of 36 open data portals in Amer-
ican cities find that the portals are in a very early stage of development
and the provision of data visualization and data analytics tools is lacking
across the cities (Thorsby et al., 2016). Regression analysis results find
that population size is the best predictor of the number of datasets pub-
lished, explaining 79.8% of the variation in the number of datasets. In
contrast, other independent variables such as the age of the portal, the
type of government, the degree of civic innovation and the level of edu-
cation in the city were not significant in predicting the number of
datasets published on the data portal.
A study of seven national open data portals as tools for transparency
and accountability in U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Australia, New Zealand,
and Singapore found that overall the portals functioned as “simple data
repositories”, which failed to facilitate ordinary citizens to reuse open
data without the provision of high quality datasets and a complete list-
ing of metadata fields (Lourenço, 2016, p. 331). Furthermore, the prac-
tice of releasing open data faced challenges of task complexity and
data quality in a case analysis of U.S. Department of Defense contracting
data (Whitmore, 2014).
2.2. Open government data
OGD refers to as “data that are freely available to everyone to use and
republish without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mecha-
nisms of control” (Jaakkola, Mäkinen, & Eteläaho, 2014, p.26). There
are three principles underlying this definition: (1) availability and ac-
cess; (2) re-use and redistribution; and (3) universal participation
(Maccani, Donnellan, & Helfert, 2015).
The five-star deployment scheme for open data was developed by
Tim Berners-Lee (Five-Star Open Data, 2015), which is useful to classify
the type of data formats among the datasets published on the open data
portals. One-star indicates that while open data is machine readable, the
data in a table or a chart is “locked-up in a document” such as PDF and is
difficult for portal users to reuse the data, and hence providing them
with lowest-level value. Two-star indicates structured data is published
in a proprietary format such as Excel's XLS that would require proprie-
tary application software for data reuse, aggregation, computation and
visualization. Three-star indicates that open data is published in a
non-proprietary open format such as CSV as well as of XLSX, enabling
a greater number of portal users to reuse and process data with tabular
structure (XLS/CSV) and tree structure (XML/JSON). Four-star indicates
that unstructured data is published in a RDF graph structure and URLs
are assigned to open data for linking with other data. Five-star indicates
linked open data through which portal users can uncover other related
data and explore the data schema directly through APIs, and hence pro-
viding them with highest added value of OGD towards apps develop-
ment and open services innovation.
Sieber and Johnson (2015) proposed four models of open data pro-
vision: data over the wall, code exchange, civic issue tracker, and
 A.T. Chatfield, C.G. Reddick / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2017) xxx–xxx 3

Table 1
Existing empirical research on open data portal analysis.

Level of government/open data portal(s) Open data portal measured by Open data policy Reference
analyzed availability examined

• Federal • Basic dataset (number of dataset categories) • No Veljković et al. (2014)

• U.S. data.gov • Data openness (Open Government Working Group's eight princi-
ples for open data)
• Data transparency (data authenticity, understandability and data
reusability)
• Federal • Data provision • No Petychakis et al. (2014)
• 27 EU nations • Data format
• Licensing, multilingual support, acquisition, ease of access
• Local • Sensor data • No Bui (2015)
• Shanghai, China & New Delhi, India • Data dashboard
• Data visualization
• Federal • Portals as tools for transparency and accountability • No Lourenço (2016)
• 7 open data portals (Australia, Canada, France, • Portal requirements (quality, completeness, access & visibility, us-
New Zealand, Singapore, U.K. & U.S.) as of April ability & comprehensibility, timeliness, value & usefulness and
2014 granularity
• Federal • Metadata schemas • No Ou & Yang (2016)
• Taiwan Open Data Portal vis-à-vis U.S., U.K. &
Canada
• Local • Open innovations through open data reuse: maps, visualizations, • No Okamoto (2016)
• New York City tools, apps and analyses
• Local • Extraction of non-geospatial information from geospatial big data • No Oliveira and Moreno (2016)
• City and County of Denver Open Data Portal
• Local • Content (the number of datasets and metadata) • Yes Thorsby et al. (2016)
• 36 cities listed on data.gov • Help (tutorials or lists of help topics)
• Published open data policy

participatory open data. The four models differ in terms of the level of
government involvement, ranging from unidirectional open data provi-
sion, to bi-directional citizen-government interactions and co-produc-
tion of data. They disagree with the argument that open data
facilitates access to government data and improve service delivery. In-
stead, they argue that open data provision as an explicit conduit can in-
crease civic participation in government functions and decision-making.
In the participatory open data model, Sieber and Johnson (2015, p. 310)
argue that “citizen contributions are dynamic, and government be-
comes responsive to demand-side requests for data”.
In contrast, Robinson, Yu, Zeller and Felten (2009, p. 175) argue that
citizen interaction with open data through online open data portals re-
quires an intermediary: “the federal government or, more effectively,
third party innovators” to provide citizens with open data reusability
through the data visualization and data analytics tools that would en-
able open data to “become increasingly intuitive”. When this state is
reached, citizens can interact directly with open data without the
need for the intermediary.
Various frameworks for open data benchmarks and country rank-
ings have been developed. However, a qualitative meta-analysis of
five open data benchmarks concluded that it is necessary to develop a
more comprehensive open government evaluation framework in gen-
eral and more comprehensive open data benchmarks in particular
(Susha, Zuiderwijk, Janssen, & Grönlund, 2014).
2.3. Data analytics tools
There are at least three different types of open data tools that are
available for citizens/portal users: “exploration tools”, “analysis tools”,
and tools for creating “mashups” (Attard et al., 2015, p. 408). Data explo-
ration tools can reduce technical barriers for citizens/portal users to en-
hance data discoverability (Colpaert, Joye, Mechant, Mannens, & Van de
Walle, 2013) of the published datasets for viewing and exploring them.
Data analytics tools including visual analytics tools (or tools for visuali-
zations) have been extensively studied (Alexopoulos, Spiliotopoulou,
& Charalabidis, 2013; Zuiderwijk, Janssen, & Parnia, 2013; Domingues,
Soares, & Jorge, 2013; Fiore, Negro, & Aloisio, 2012; Attard et al., 2015;
Graves & Hendler, 2013; Assaf, Troncy, & Senart, 2015). Visual analytics
can provide citizen-portal users with "a simple mechanism to
understand and communicate large amounts of data” (Graves &
Hendler, 2013, p. 4; Few, 2013) and hence can make it easier for citi-
zen-portal users to identify otherwise hidden patterns in the published
datasets. Finally, mashups tools enable citizen-portal users to join differ-
ent datasets, which may provide them new insights to explore in the
open services innovation process.
Prior research studies also paid attention to other tools: Application
Programming Interface (API) (Zuiderwijk et al., 2013; Geniş, 2010;
Otte-Trojel et al., 2015; Graves & Hendler, 2013; Alexopoulos et al.,
2013; Attard et al., 2015). API is a set of routines, protocols, and tools
for developing software applications and is an essential tool for citi-
zen-portal users with computing skills in developing new applications
using open data (Lněnička & Máchová, 2015). API can also provide citi-
zen-portal users with greater flexibility in creating different types of vi-
sual representations (Graves & Hendler, 2013).
In addition to API, prior research studies also identified data format
conversion tools (Alexopoulos et al., 2013; Zuiderwijk et al., 2013;
Attard et al., 2015). Data format conversion tools enable the creation
of different file formats for the published datasets. The format conver-
sion can make the published datasets available for data analytics
(Popovic, Kezunovic, & Krstajic, 2015). Moreover, open-source data por-
tal software, such as the CKAN data management platform, provides
dashboard tools to visually present summary statistics on, for example,
the most popular datasets among citizen-portal users and government-
portal users with the greater number of published datasets.
2.4. Open data policy intensity
The policy research literature identifies different levels of public policy
details, such as policy net benefits, as a significant factor influencing pol-
icy implementation outcomes in various economic, environmental, ed-
ucational and medical policy contexts. Recently, the term “policy
intensity” in the public policy research literature has been applied to de-
scribe different levels of public policy details in the specific context of
big data policy cycle (Höchtl, Parycek, & Schöllhammer, 2016, p. 162),
climate policy output (Schaffrin, Sewerin, & Seubert, 2015), and envi-
ronmental justice (Abel, Salazar, & Robert, 2015).
In the e-government policy context, Virili and Sorrentino (2009) dis-
tinguish inter-related concepts of policy output, policy outcome, and

Please cite this article as: Chatfield, A.T., & Reddick, C.G., A longitudinal cross-sector analysis of open data portal service capability: The case of
Australian local governments, Government Information Quarterly (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2017.02.004
4 A.T. Chatfield, C.G. Reddick / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
policy impact. Availability of IT assets is viewed as e-government policy
output, whereas their proper use represents policy outcome. Policy out-
comes including active and intensive use of e-government website can
have their final effects on enhanced public services, which is considered
as policy impact.
While prior research studies on open data policies have not exam-
ined the effect of open data policies on either policy outcomes or policy
impacts (Ubaldi, 2013; Zuiderwijk & Janssen, 2014), public policy re-
search studies in other contexts found positive effects of public policy
intensity on practice (Coffield et al., 2007) and intended policy out-
comes (Hauck, Görg, Varjopuro, Ratamäki, & Jax, 2013). However,
other policy studies suggest public policy intensity alone does not fully
explain either practice or intended or unintended policy outcomes,
with possibility of moderating effects of the way in which the policy is
implemented and the way in which multi-stakeholders are involved
in the policy implementation.
Finally, the existing open data policy frameworks in general do not
empirically examine open data portal service capabilities and mecha-
nisms for open services innovation through open data reuse by citi-
zens/portal users.
2.5. Open services innovation
A paradigm shift in industrial innovation has shown radical changes
in private-sector innovation practices, from the traditional exclusive re-
liance on in-house closed R&D department to the power of exploring
and exploiting external ideas and knowledge through open innovation
networks that reside outside the firm boundaries (Chesbrough, 2003;
Dittrich & Duysters, 2007; Huston & Sakkab, 2006) to achieve firm-
level competitive advantage more effectively, more efficiently, and
faster (Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke, & West, 2006; Eservel, 2014; Han
et al., 2012). Here both the firm's internal R&D capabilities and re-
sources and those of external, open innovation networks are comple-
mentary assets rather than substitutes.
Historically, high-tech firms such as Lucent, 3Com, IBM, Intel and
Millenium Pharmaceuticals were early adopters of open innovation
practices. But a survey research found evidence of the diffusion of
open innovation practices to more traditional and mature industries
as well (Chesbrough & Crowther, 2006). Proctor & Gamble engaged cus-
tomers in user-driven new product development innovations by pro-
viding them with a proprietary “Connect and Develop” innovation
technology platform (Dodgson, Gann, & Salter, 2006).
More recently, open innovation practices have moved to service in-
dustries, which is coined as “open services innovation” (Chesbrough &
Euchner, 2011, p. 12; Chesbrough, 2011). Open services innovation
aims to transform customer experience through engaging consumer
product users in what Chesbrough (2011, p. 87) refers to as “a service
value web”. This web of five sequential activities are connected in a cir-
cular and iterative way. A service value web starts with “eliciting tacit
knowledge from customers”, which leads to “design experience”, “ser-
vice offering”, “customer engagement”, and “customer service co-crea-
tion”. What is important here is this logic: a service firm's service
offering to customers is an antecedent of customer engagement, and
customer engagement in turn is an antecedent to customer service co-cre-
ation. So for the success of open services innovation, engaging cus-
tomers in positive ways which can transform their customer
experience is critically important. Needless to say, to engage customers
in an intensive way to motivate customer service co-creation, the service
offering must be intrinsically meaningful or interesting to customers.
Chesbrough (2011, p. 87) argues that “openness” in the context of
open services innovation broadly refers to as “ways of sharing with
others and inviting their participation.” Chesbrough (2011) identifies
two complementary forms of openness: (1) inside-out in which the
focal firm provides external business firms with its own ideas, technol-
ogies or processes for OSI and (2) outside-in in which the focal firm ex-
plores and exploits external ideas or technologies for its own business
Please cite this article as: Chatfield, A.T., & Reddick, C.G., A longitudinal cross-sector analysis of open data portal service capability: The case of
Australian local governments, Government Information Quarterly (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2017.02.004
innovations. Similarly, Dahlander and Gann (2010) identified two dif-
ferent processes of openness in open innovation: (1) outbound innova-
tion process involving “revealing” and “selling” and (2) inbound
innovation process involving “sourcing” and “acquiring”. Since out-
bound innovation requires revealing the firm's proprietary knowledge
and technologies to external individuals and organizations, the key to out-
bound innovation success is higher-levels of openness which under-
scores the firm's capability to open up flows of its own ideas,
resources and individuals across the firm boundaries. In contrast, in-
bound innovation success depends on the firm's open and forward-
thinking culture with absorptive capability to explore and exploit the
external environment for sourcing and acquiring knowledge and tech-
nologies produced by external individuals and organizations.
3. Methodology
As discussed in the previous section, there is the paucity of OGD por-
tal service capability and impact research in general and that at the local
government level in particular, in part due to the newness of the OGD
research domain. In this paper we examine the implementation of
OGD portals at the local government level in a specific context of Austra-
lian OGD initiatives. We have strategically selected Australia for four
reasons.
First, Australia was ranked as the world's 2nd best in e-government
development based on the 2014 United Nations E-Government Survey
results (United Nations, 2014). Second, Australia is one of the early
adopters of participatory open government and open data policies,
with the declaration of Open Government in July 2010 (Australian
Government Department of Finance and Deregulation, 2010). Third, in
the same year, 2009, when the U.S. data.gov OGD portal was launched,
the Australia's data.gov.au OGD portal was also launched as an “open-
by-default” strategy towards publishing government data. More recent-
ly, the Public Data Branch in the Australian Government Department of
the Prime Minister and Cabinet, which is responsible for the portal de-
velopment and operation as well as NationalMap and whole of govern-
ment data policy, issued the Australian Government Public Data Policy
Statement. It recognizes government data as “a strategic national re-
source that holds considerable value for growing the economy, improv-
ing service delivery and transforming policy outcomes for the nation.”
(Australian Government Department of the Prime Minister and
Cabinet, 2015, p. 1) Finally, Australia tied with Finland as the global
top 5th nation based on the 2015 “data openness index” (Global Open
Data Index, 2015). With the score of 67% in data openness, Australia is
behind four nations: Taiwan (78%), United Kingdom (76%), Denmark
(70%) and Columbia (68%), while Australia is ahead of 8th ranked Unit-
ed States and Netherlands (64%).
3.1. Sampling local governments
A total of twenty largest local governments (or city and regional
councils) were selected based on the official Estimated Resident Popula-
tion (ERP) values (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2015). The publicly
available ERP values for the sample were verified against other informa-
tion sources, including Wikipedia, to ensure the inclusion of city coun-
cils characterized by the large Local Government Area (by population).
We also ensured the inclusion of Australia's all 7 states (New South
Wales, Victoria, Queensland, The Northern Territory, South Australia,
Western Australia, Tasmania), and The Australian Capital Territory
(ACT) which is equivalent of Washington, D.C. Our rationale for the in-
clusion of the larger local governments is that the planning, launch and
operation of dedicated government data portal at the local government
level requires substantial resource allocation and commitment such as
capital, technology and human resources.
Table 2 shows the list of these twenty local governments whose
open data portals are investigated in this study. Fig. 1 shows the geo-
graphical locations of the twenty local governments on a map of
 A.T. Chatfield, C.G. Reddick / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2017) xxx–xxx 5

Table 2 the provision of entrepreneurial data services which are intended to en-
A sample of 20 local governments studied. gage citizens/portal users in data reuse and citizen co-production in
State Local government (e-government URL) apps development towards open services innovation. The entrepre-
1 The Northern Darwin City Council (http://www.darwin.nt.gov.au)
neurial data services we examined include the provision of hackathon
Territory idea competitions, data analytics tools, and data mapping/data model-
2 Queensland Brisbane City Council (http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au) ing services.
3 Queensland Gold Coast City Council During the study 1 data collection period, each portal was visited
(http://www.goldcoast.qld.gov.au)
several times to collect the necessary information required to answer
4 Queensland Moreton Bay Regional Council
(http://www.moretonbay.qld. gov.au) the first question. A team of one first-year Ph.D. student in e-govern-
5 New South Wales Sydney City Council (http://www.sydney.nsw.gov.au) ment and one senior academic researcher who is very familiar with
6 New South Wales Sutherland Shire Council the Australian open government landscape conducted website analysis
(http://www.sutherland.nsw.gov.au) of the content of the twenty open data portals concurrently and indepen-
7 New South Wales Blacktown City Council
(http://www.blacktown.nsw.gov.au)
dently during the data collection and analysis period of October and No-
8 New South Wales Wollongong City Council vember 2015. With one of the authors serving as an independent
(http://www.wollongong.nsw.gov.au) reviewer of these analysis results, the team of three paid special atten-
9 n/a The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Government in tion to resolve any issues of discrepancy and noteworthy discoveries
Canberra (http://www.canberra.act.gov.au)
via email and Skype meetings. In consequence, the final inter-rater reli-
10 Victoria Melbourne City Council
(http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au) ability reached over 0.9 regarding the assessment of the twenty local
11 Victoria Greater Geelong City Council governments' open data portals.
(http://www.geelong.vic.gov.au) The study 2 data collection in September 2016 followed the
12 Victoria Casey City Council (http://www.casey.vic.gov.au) established protocol and procedure of the study 1 and was carried out
13 Victoria Wyndham City Council
by one of the authors alone, with no measurement of the inter-rater re-
(http://www.wyndham.vic.gov.au)
14 Tasmania Hobart City Council (http://www.hobart.tas.gov.au) liability. With increased familiarity and knowledge of the sample, the
15 Tasmania Launceston City Council data collection time was much reduced in the study 2. A longitudinal
(http://www.launceston.tas.gov.au) study involving the two data collection periods is thought to increase
16 South Australia Adelaide City Council (http://www.adelaide.sa.gov.au)
our knowledge and insights into the dynamically changing nature of
17 South Australia Salisbury City Council (http://www.salisbury.sa.gov.au)
18 South Australia Port Adelaide Enfield City Council
OGD portal service capability development over time.
(http://www.enfield.sa.gov.au) Although this study dominantly focused on the supply-side open
19 South Australia Onkaparinga City Council data portal service capabilities across the sample, we have conducted
(http://www.onkaparinga.sa.gov.au) a post-hoc hour-long interview with senior manager of Greater Geelong
20 Western Australia Perth City Council (http://www.perth.wa.gov.au)
City Council to gain further insights into the key findings we found in
this study as well as new insights into demand-side issues such as citi-
zen engagement strategy and citizen co-production of open services
Australia. A black dot represents the geographical location of a local gov- innovation.
ernment and the size of the dot reflects the population of the local gov-
ernment area. 4. Results

3.2. Cross-sector website analysis of OGD portals
We employed longitudinal cross-sector website analysis for OGD
portal content mining, which is a nonreactive and unobtrusive research
method in the social sciences (Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, & Sechrest,
1966). Website analysis as a valid research methodology for social sci-
ence research has been widely accepted and applied in e-government
research (Elling, Lentz, de Jong, & van den Bergh, 2012; Reddick &
Norris, 2013; Kuhlmeier & Lipscomb, 2014; Youngblood, 2014;
Tassabehji, Hackney, & Popovic, 2016). Similarly, web mining has
emerged as an integrative part of environmental scanning by web-
based companies for extracting business intelligence and new insights
from websites often using data, text, and visual analytics tools
(Sabherwal & Becerra-Fernandez, 2011). There are three types of uses
for web mining: web structure mining, web usage mining, and web con-
tent mining (Kosala & Blockeel, 2002; Jackson, 2002). In our study, we
paid particular attention to web content mining to answer the first re-
search question.
3.3. Longitudinal data collection and data analysis
For all 20 local data portals, OGD portal website analysis was con-
ducted in two different time periods: the first study conducted in Octo-
ber/November 2015 and the second study conducted in September
2016. Both studies aimed to identify (1) the adoption of open data pol-
icy, (2) the provision of open data in terms of the number of govern-
ment datasets published on the OGD portal, (3) the provision of open
data in terms of the type of machine-readable data formats (or file ex-
tensions), such as XLS, CSV, RDF, WMS, KML, SHP and XML, and (4)
The central research question we need to answer is: Do open data
portal service capabilities differ in terms of open data provision, data format
variety, open data policy intensity, and entrepreneurial data services, in-
cluding analytics tools, hackathon competitions, and data modeling? In ad-
dressing this question, we performed a longitudinal cross-sector
website analysis of Australia's twenty local governments' OGD portals
over two time periods: the first study in October–November 2015 and
the second study in September 2016. In this section, we report our lon-
gitudinal cross-sector analysis results on the number of published
datasets, the type of data formats that were accessible for reuse, open
data policy intensity, and the provision of entrepreneurial data services
for meaningful citizen engagement towards open services innovation.
4.1. Number of datasets
Table 3 below shows that of the twenty local governments studied
during the study 1 and study 2. For study 1, only four (20%) local gov-
ernments adopted and published open data policies online: Melbourne
City Council, Greater Geelong City Council, The ACT government in Can-
berra, and Hobart City Council (with a 1 indicating an open data policy, 0
is no policy). We adopt the term “policy group” to categorize the policy
adopters. The remainder of 16 local governments did not adopt or pub-
lish their open data policies online as of November 27, 2015. They are
referred to as “non-policy group” in this paper. We believe that the adop-
tion of an open data policy by the local government is an indication of
support for open government data within the government. There can
be other indicators, but having an explicit policy shows that the local
government shows that they have thought about open data and how
it fits within the overall plan of their government. It should be noted

Please cite this article as: Chatfield, A.T., & Reddick, C.G., A longitudinal cross-sector analysis of open data portal service capability: The case of
Australian local governments, Government Information Quarterly (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2017.02.004
6 A.T. Chatfield, C.G. Reddick / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2017) xxx–xxx

Fig. 1. A sample of 20 local governments on a map of Australia.

when we look at the publication of open data policies, we have not eval- that citizens/portal users could view and download for reuse during
uated how effective the implementation was for the government. the study 1 period. Table 3 show (1) open data policy adoption (yes
Cross-sector analysis of the twenty local-government-level open vis-à-vis no) and (2) the number of published datasets uncovered.
data portals shows that they published the varying number of datasets For study 1, the average number of published datasets across the 20
cities is 40 in the study 1, whereas the median is 25. This difference be-
Table 3 tween the mean and the median clearly indicates the presence of out-
Open data policy adoption and number of datasets, comparing study 1 and 2. liers; cities that published much larger numbers of datasets such as
the top 3: 178 of Brisbane City Council in Queensland, 88 of Melbourne
City council Study group 1 Study group 2
City Council in Victoria, and 79 of Greater Geelong City Council also in
Open data Number of Open data Number of
Victoria. The number of datasets ranges from the high of 178 for Bris-
policy datasets policy datasets
bane City Council's open data portal to the low of 4 for Sutherland
Adelaide 0 54 0 74 Shire Council in New South Wales. While Melbourne City Council pub-
Blacktown 0 9 0 1
Brisbane 0 178 1 373
lished 88 datasets, the second largest number of published datasets, it
ACT in Canberra 1 67 1 307 is significantly less than Brisbane City Council's 178.
Casey 0 23 1 48 Next we compared the mean of the policy group (4 local govern-
Darwin 0 11 0 326 ments with a combined total of 266 published datasets) with that of
Gold Coast 0 67 0 86
the non-policy group (17 local governments with a combined total of
Greater Geelong 1 79 1 156
Hobart 1 32 1 109 622 datasets). For the study 1, the mean of the policy group was 66.5,
Launceston 0 27 0 31 whereas that of the non-policy group was 33.9, indicating a large gap
Melbourne 1 88 1 110 between the two groups in terms of the number of published open
Morton Bay Region 0 18 1 158 data. This analysis finding indicates a possible positive impact of the
Onkaparinga 0 18 0 12
Perth 0 18 0 57
public declaration of open data policy on spurring the local government
Port Adelaide 0 21 0 23 departments to regularly and proactively share their data with citizens/
Enfield portal users.
Salisbury 0 9 0 135 Furthermore, the policy group of 4 invested in the development and
Sutherland 0 4 0 1
implementation of their own open data portals, whereas the bottom 4
Sydney 0 52 0 67
Wollongong 0 28 0 23 cities of the non-policy group, including Sutherland Shire Council, did
Wyndham 0 6 0 13 not invest in the development of their own open data portals and in-
Median 25 71 stead outsourced their data publications to the New South Wales state
Mean 40 106 government open data portal (data.nsw.gov.au). In summary, the
Standard Deviation 41 111
study 1 cross-sector analysis results clearly indicate that both open

Please cite this article as: Chatfield, A.T., & Reddick, C.G., A longitudinal cross-sector analysis of open data portal service capability: The case of
Australian local governments, Government Information Quarterly (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2017.02.004
 A.T. Chatfield, C.G. Reddick / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
data policy and open data portal investment by the four local govern-
ments are positively associated with the observed greater openness of
their data portals as measured by the number of published open data.
As Table 3 also shows, the mean number and the median of the pub-
lished datasets across the 20 cities in the study 2 were increased to 106
and 71, respectively, from those of the study 1; 40 and 25. Furthermore,
we again compared the mean of the policy group (7 local governments
with a combined total of 1261 published datasets) with that of the non-
policy group (13 local governments with a combined total of 849
datasets). In comparison to the study 1, the mean of the policy group
in the study 2 was 180.1, whereas that of the non-policy group was
65.3, indicating a significantly widening gap between the two groups
over time. Fig. 2 shows this longitudinal comparative analysis results.
This longitudinal comparative analysis results clearly indicate a sus-
tainable positive impact of the public adoption and declaration of open
data policy on intensifying the local government departments' coordi-
nated efforts to regularly and proactively share their datasets with citi-
zens/portal users on their open data portal. In other words, the public
adoption and declaration of OGD policy can generate an added value
in signaling the local government's commitment to publishing govern-
ment data openly as the default.
Fig. 3 below shows a comparison of the number of datasets pub-
lished by the 20 local governments in 2015 (in blue) vis-à-vis that in
2016 (in red). Of the twenty, four local governments, namely Blacktown
(−89%), Sutherland (− 75%), Onkaparinga (− 33%), and Wollongong
(− 18%), published less open data in 2016 than did they in 2015. Of
the remaining 16 local governments all of which increased the number
of datasets published in 2016, Fig. 3 shows 8 greater surges (shown as
peaks on the red line graph) made in 2016 by Darwin (2864%), Salisbury
(1400%), Moreton Bay Regional (778%), The ACT (358%), Hobart (241%),
Brisbane (110%), Casey (109%), and Greater Geelong (97%). Of these
eight local governments, two of them, namely The ACT and Hobart,
adopted their open data policies in 2015 or earlier, whereas three of
them, namely Moreton Bay Regional, Brisbane and Casey, adopted their
open data policies in 2016. In contrast, Darwin and Salisbury increased
the number of datasets published in 2016 without the adoption of their
open data policies.
4.2. Type of machine-readable formats of datasets
As mentioned previously, the five-star deployment scheme for open
data was developed by Tim Berners-Lee (Five-Star Open Data, 2015)
which was discussed in the Section 2. We applied this scheme to iden-
tify various machine-readable data formats published by the twenty
local governments for the study 2 conducted in September 2016. In
our paper we hold that higher-star data formats indicate greater open-
ness of data portals and hence greater open data portal service capabil-
ities for citizens/portal users. As discussed in the Section 2, one-star
open data in a table or a chart is “locked-up in a document” such as
Fig. 2. Longitudinal comparison of policy group and non-policy group.
Please cite this article as: Chatfield, A.T., & Reddick, C.G., A longitudinal cross-sector analysis of open data portal service capability: The case of
Australian local governments, Government Information Quarterly (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2017.02.004
7
PDF, making it difficult for reuse, hence providing citizens/portal users
with lowest-level value. Two-star indicates structured data is published
in a proprietary format such as Excel's XLS that would require proprie-
tary application software for data reuse, aggregation, computation and
visualization. Three-star indicates that open data is published in a
non-proprietary open format such as CSV as well as of XLSX, enabling
a greater number of portal users to reuse and process data with tabular
structure (XLS/CSV) and tree structure (XML/JSON). While both two-
star and three-star data formats indicate typically structured data that
often populate relational database management systems in organiza-
tions, four-star data formats indicate unstructured data, a dominant
characteristic of so-called big data. Research shows that 95% of big
data represents unstructured data (Gandomi & Haider, 2015). High vol-
umes of unstructured data come from diverse data sources (Davenport,
2014) and include geospatial data, sensor data, social media text data,
and surveillance video streaming data.
Four-star indicates that unstructured data is published in a RDF
graph structure and URLs are assigned to open data for linking with
other data. Five-star indicates linked open data through which portal
users can uncover other related data and explore the data schema di-
rectly through APIs, and hence providing them with highest added
value of OGD towards apps development and open services innovation.
In general, we found it difficult to identify whether or not a given
dataset is a five-star level of linked open data since many of the open
data portals studied in this research do not provide such an information.
Therefore, we did not assess the five-star level for the sample.
The top of Fig. 4 shows the type of data formats published by the four
local governments that published less datasets in 2016 vis-à-vis 2015;
namely Blacktown, Sutherland, Onkararinga, and Wollongong, all of
whom were of the non-policy group. Of the four, both Blacktown and
Sutherland City Councils published 100% of their datasets in 1-star
level, making it difficult for portal users to extract data embedded in
PDF or other files.
Fig. 4 also shows the group of 8 local governments which published
at least 100 or more datasets in 2016 and demonstrated very large gains
in the number of datasets published between 2015 and 2016. Casey City
Council was left out because of the number of its published datasets fell
below the cut-off of 100. In terms of 4-star level datasets, 7 local govern-
ments, namely, Moreton Bay, Greater Geelong, Hobart, The ACT in Can-
berra, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Salisbury, published a larger portion of
their open data in geospatial data and GIS formats in 2016. In compari-
son, Darwin published a much less portion of their datasets in 4-star
level data format.
It is noteworthy that of the seven local open data portals which pub-
lished the 4-star level datasets, six of them adopted and published their
open data policies online, with Salisbury City Council as the only one ex-
ception. In contrast, none of the non-policy group of 4 adopted an open
data policy as of the end of the study 2 ending in September 30. As cir-
cled in Fig. 4, a group of 4 all outsourced their data publishing either to
the federal government open data portal (Wollongong) or to their state
government open data portals (Blacktown, Sutherland, and
Onkararinga) without launching their own open data portals to front-
end the state government data portals.
4.3. Open data policy intensity
Open data policy intensity refers to the content quality of policy in-
struments publicly published. It can include policy details including ob-
jectives, scope, integration, budget, implementation, and monitoring
(Schaffrin et al., 2015) as well as data-driven government vision, net
benefits and goals (Chatfield, Reddick, & Al-Zubaidi, 2015). Here special
attention is paid to policy details on how to promote meaningful citizen
engagement and how to actually achieve open innovation objectives in
order for local governments to realize the potential benefits from open-
ing government data to citizens/portal users through the implementa-
tion of open data portals. In other words, these external goals-focused
8 A.T. Chatfield, C.G. Reddick / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
Fig. 3. The number of datasets published in 2015 vis-à-vis 2016: a comparison. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure, the reader is referred to the web version of this
article.)
open data policies are distinguished from internal goals-focused policies
that aim to enhance government transparency and public services effi-
ciency. In this study, open data policy intensity is viewed as high if a
given open data policy is external goals-focused, whereas it is considered
as low if it is internal goals-focused.
As discussed earlier in this section, the size of the policy group is
much smaller than that of the non-policy group over time. Four local
governments (20%) in the study 1 and seven local governments (35%)
in the study 2, out of the 20 local governments studied, adopted and
published their open data policies online. Therefore, our cross-sector
analysis results on open data policy intensity are limited to the seven
local governments with open data policies. Table 4 shows the level of
open data policy intensity for the 7 City Councils.
Of the seven local governments, Brisbane is the earliest local govern-
ment that adopted an open data policy and launched its dedicated open
data portal in November 2011. According to the Brisbane City Council e-
government portal, it adopted an additional $368,000 open data invest-
ment budget in 2016–17 (out of the total budget of $2.9 billion). It also
launched the Smart City Initiative that would leverage the open data ini-
tiative success. Greater Geelong City Council modeled their “data access
policy” after the Victorian state government's “data access policy” in De-
cember 2013. Melbourne City Council adopted an “open by default”
open data policy on 25 November 2014 by stating that “Building an
Fig. 4. Type of open data formats: “4 worst” of the non-policy group encircled and the 7
policy group plus Salisbury City Council.
Please cite this article as: Chatfield, A.T., & Reddick, C.G., A longitudinal cross-sector analysis of open data portal service capability: The case of
Australian local governments, Government Information Quarterly (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2017.02.004
accessible, transparent and responsive organisation is one of the goals
in our four-year Council Plan 2013-17. We aim to become one of the
most transparent councils in Australia.” All these three earlier open
data policies tend to strongly focus on internal goals such as enhanced
government transparency and operational efficiency gains and govern-
ment productivity through the publication of open data.
Brisbane City Council and Greater Geelong City Council show 110%
and 97% increase in the number of open data published in 2016 over
2015, respectively, whereas in comparison Melbourne shows a much
more subdued 29% increase. More recently, however, Melbourne City
Council's open data portal message shifts its focus on external stake-
holders since it “invites active citizen engagement” for open innovation
through the provision of linked geospatial open data and data visualiza-
tion tools on its open data portal. All these three open data policies are
rather short in length, ranging from 2 to 3 pages.
In contrast, Hobart City Council and The ACT government that pub-
lished their open data policies in March 2015 and December 2015, re-
spectively, and Moreton Bay Regional Council that published its open
data policies in August 2016 not only focus on the internal goals as the
earlier policy adopters did but also more explicitly underscore external
goals. For example, Hobart City Council's open data policy manual
states: “Council's marketing, media and community engagement – sec-
tors will engage with our community, set strategy and manage publish-
ing” (Hobart City Council, 2015, p. 10). Similarly, the ACT government
underscore the importance of citizen engagement in their policy, such
as “citizen participation in the governing process” (ACT government,
The Office of the Chief Digital Officer, 2015), entrepreneurial citizen en-
gagement such as “public collaboration in finding solutions to prob-
lems” (ACT government, The Office of the Chief Digital Officer, 2015),
and open innovations of greater value through linked open data (ACT
government, The Office of the Chief Digital Officer, 2015, p. 2). While
most of the published open data policies in our sample tend to be
short (2–3 pages), The ACT government open data policy consists of 9
pages and indicates a high-level policy intensity including expected
benefits and explicit citizen engagement strategy for open innovation.
The ACT government's open data policy document asserts that “more
vigorous open data policies could add around AUD $16 billion per
annum to the Australian economy (ACT government, The Office of the
Chief Digital Officer, 2015, p. 3).
Hobart City Council, The ACT government, and Moreton Bay Region-
al Council which show high open data policy intensity in the study 2 ex-
perienced 241%, 358% and 778% increase in the number of datasets
 A.T. Chatfield, C.G. Reddick / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
Table 4
Open data policy intensity across the 7 policy group.
City council (year of policy publication) Open data policy intensity
Brisbane (2011) Medium
Greater Geelong (2013) Medium
Melbourne (November 2014) Low
Hobart (March 2015) High
The ACT (December 2015) High
Moreton Bay (August 2016) High
Casey (September 2016) Low
published in 2016 over 2015, respectively. Our analysis results indicate
the positive impact of high open data policy intensity on enhanced
openness of data portal over time as measured by the number of
datasets proactively released on the portal. However, it must be noted
that our analysis of open data policies published by the seven local gov-
ernments of Australia show that the relative lack of citizen engagement
policy details to produce open innovations, although five out of the
seven local governments state open innovation as one of the potential
benefits of OGD and open data portal.
4.4. Entrepreneurial data portal services for portal user engagement
In addressing the first research question on the provision of entre-
preneurial data portal services we assessed the same twenty OGD portal
implementation sites during the study 2 conducted in September 2016.
Specifically, we drew on prior research on open innovation to examine
whether or not any open data portal went beyond the provision of open
data for active citizen engagement towards citizen co-production of
open services innovation. Table 5 shows our analysis results on the 7
policy group.
Out of the 20 local governments analyzed, 8 (40%) hosted an annual
government hackathon idea competition. Australian local government
sponsored hackathon typically is a 46 hour-long event held over the
weekend. All the eight local governments provided their local datasets
and promoted these competitions online with incentives of prizes and
“catered meals” to engage individual entrepreneurs and teams of local
innovators, entrepreneurs and programmers to enter the idea competi-
tions. Participants were challenged to create a project page, proof of
concept and a video to narrate the story of how local open data could
be reused to solve a local problem or to improve the existing public ser-
vices. Due to the constraint of the time-limited weekend event, the par-
ticipants often do not develop new apps.
Table 5 above shows five (71%) of the 7 policy group sponsored gov-
ernment hackathons. They are variously named such as Brisbane's
“Hackerspace Project Page”, “Creative Challenge GovHack” for Greater
Geelong, “govhack ACT”, “govhack Hobart”, and Melbourne's
“GovHack”. There are two exceptions in the policy group that did not
sponsor any government hackathon as of the end of the study 2:
Moreton Bay Regional Council and Casey City Council. In contrast, only
three (23%) of the 13 non-policy group sponsored “govhack hack for
Wyndham”, Gold Coast's “GovHack Hackerspace”, and “GovHack Laun-
ceston”. In light of Chesbrough (2011), this finding too shows the im-
portant role of open data policy in mobilizing government resources
Table 5
Entrepreneurial data portal services across the 7 policy group.
Open data policy intensity Own open data portal
Hobart (March 2015) High Yes
The ACT (December 2015) High Yes
Moreton Bay (August 2016) High Yes
Brisbane (2011) Medium Yes
Greater Geelong (2013) Medium Yes
Casey (September 2016) Low No
Melbourne (November 2014) Low Yes
Please cite this article as: Chatfield, A.T., & Reddick, C.G., A longitudinal cross-sector analysis of open data portal service capability: The case of
Australian local governments, Government Information Quarterly (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2017.02.004
9
Internal goals-focused External goals-focused
Government transparency Public services efficiency Citizen engagement Open innovation
✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓
towards citizen engagement which is required for generating innova-
tive ideas through open data reuse.
During an hour-long Skype interview, senior manager of Greater
Geelong Council's Department of Digital, Information and Technology,
whose role he described as a cross between a CIO and a Chief Digital Of-
ficer, indicated that hackathon sponsorship was a positive experience
for the city in re-affirming the great potential value of open data but
that real challenges for his city's open data portal are how to have a
wide range of effective stakeholder engagement with open data reuse
and how to motivate the stakeholders from innovative idea generation
through open data reuse towards open innovation generation through
open data reuse.
We also investigated whether or not open data portals provided data
analytics tools to further encourage citizen engagement and promote
the reuse of open data. Out of the sample of 20, nine local governments
provided data analytics tools to promote active citizen engagement.
Table 5 shows 6 (85.7%) out of the 7 policy group, except Casey City
Council, provided data analytics tools on their open data portals. Data
analytics tools provided are as follows: Moreton Bay Regional Council
(APIs; ESRI Open Data Map), The ACT government in Canberra (Open
spatial data & digital maps; catalogue and pre-built views; geospatial
data visualization tools), Hobart City Council (Open geospatial data por-
tal & interactive online maps), Brisbane (REST APIs), Greater Geelong
City Council (Geospatial visualization tools), and Melbourne City Coun-
cil (Visualization tools for linked open data; number of data viewed,
data analytics tookkit). In contrast, only 3 out of the 13 non-policy
group provided data analytics tools: Darwin City Council (APIs; GIS
Coud spatial data), Gold Coast City Council (Open geospatial data direct-
ly accessible through APIs; Open data dashboard), and Launceston City
Council (arcGIS open data Portal; Geospatial data that can be searched
within maps; planning apps).
Finally, we investigated the sample of 20 local governments to find
whether or not any local governments provided not only self-service
data analytics tools but also more actively foster advanced data analysis
or data modeling capabilities in citizens, businesses and non-profit or-
ganizations. Out of the sample of 20, we found only two local govern-
ments who provided value-adding data analytics and data modeling
capability development. Brisbane City Council provided eBIMAP2 geo-
spatial mapping services (assets and property) for business users (on
subscription payment basis). Greater Geelong City Council also enabled
12 local architecture firms to significantly shorten the time required to
build 3D data modeling for building permit architectural design plans
(free of charge). The firms' 3D models in turn enabled the city's
Government data hackathon Data analytics tools 3D geospatial data modeling
✓ ✓
✓ ✓
✓
✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓
10 A.T. Chatfield, C.G. Reddick / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
government decision-making transparency and internal operational
gains through the significantly reduced staff times in assessment and
building permit issuance.
5. Discussion
In this longitudinal cross-sector analysis of the twenty open data
portals in Australian cities, we have answered our central research
question on open data portal service capabilities. We found strong evi-
dence indicating the large variation across Australia's twenty open
data portal service capabilities at the local government level. In this lon-
gitudinal cross-sector analysis study open data portal service capabili-
ties were measured by open data provision, data format variety, open
data policy intensity, and entrepreneurial data services, including ana-
lytics tools, hackathon competitions, and data modeling services to
spur citizen engagement with open data reuse.
Importantly, the policy group – the group of 7 local governments
that published their open data policies by the end of the study 2 in Sep-
tember 2016 – have increased, over time, the greater number of pub-
lished open data, with higher star data formats, than the non-policy
group of 13 local governments. Of the policy group, local governments
with both high and medium open data policy intensity tended to pro-
vide open data portal services beyond open data provision. Moreover,
of the policy group, 6 (85.7%) out of the 7 local governments invested
in their own dedicated open data portals in comparison to only 3
(23%) out of 13 local governments of the non-policy group which
launched their own open data portals, with 10 (77%) local governments
that decided to outsource data publication to either the state or the fed-
eral government open data portal. Overall, these results clearly indicate
the important roles of open data policy intensity and dedicated open
data portal investment in facilitating enhanced data portal service capa-
bility over time. Our findings are consistent with prior research on pub-
lic policy intensity. As we discussed earlier in the Section 2, public policy
research studies in other contexts than open data policy found positive
effects of public policy intensity on practice (Coffield et al., 2007) and
intended policy outcomes (Hauck et al., 2013). As public policy intensity
studies suggest, our findings also indicate that public policy intensity
alone does not fully explain either OGD practice or intended policy out-
comes, with possibility of moderating effects of the way in which the
open data policy was implemented and the way in which multi-stake-
holders such as various local government departments were engaged
in the open data policy implementation, namely the development, im-
plementation and operation of open data portal and the level of data
portal openness through the provision of open data as the default.
Our key findings indicate three important implications for OGD re-
search and practices. First, open data policy in general and open data
policy intensity in particular can provide good predictors of the success-
ful development of supply-side open data portal service capabilities
necessary for attracting and engaging citizens/portal users for open
data reuse towards citizen co-production of open services innovation.
As we discussed earlier in this paper, there are various comprehensive
open data policy evaluation frameworks, some of which were applied
to empirically analyze the existing open data policies (Zuiderwijk &
Janssen, 2014). However, the open data policy research stream in gener-
al tends not to investigate open data portal capabilities.
In this paper we draw on the open innovation literature to argue for
the importance of studying open data portal service capabilities. Open
services innovation research strongly indicates the critical importance
of the quality of a service firm's service offering to customers since it is
an antecedent of customer engagement, which in turn is an antecedent
to customer service co-creation that is coined as open services innovation
(Chesbrough, 2011). Similarly, to engage citizens/portal users in an in-
tensive way to motivate citizen co-production of open services innova-
tion through open data reuse, the local government's open data portal
service capabilities offering must be intrinsically meaningful or interesting
to citizens/portal users. Needless to say, merely publishing open data
Please cite this article as: Chatfield, A.T., & Reddick, C.G., A longitudinal cross-sector analysis of open data portal service capability: The case of
Australian local governments, Government Information Quarterly (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2017.02.004
with lower star data formats like many of the non-policy group did
will not likely achieve the potential transformative benefits of OGD
initiatives.
Our findings on the importance of open data portal service capability
development over time are also consistent with public-sector innova-
tion research. Salge and Vera (2012) found that open innovation-gener-
ating activities are contingent on the level of the focal government
organization's customer and learning orientation. The results indicate
that open innovation is associated with higher public service quality
when the level of customer and learning orientation within the focal or-
ganization is high. Similarly, drawing on a case of Data.gov,
Krishnamurthy and Awazu (2016) found it necessary for the govern-
ment to commit resources to improve its capabilities to open more by
moving towards open data by default.
Our longitudinal cross-sector analysis results suggest the impor-
tance of cross-fertilizing the open data policy research stream and the
open data portal capability/impact research stream in the future re-
search. Results also suggest the importance of external goals-focused
open data policy development if governments aim to realize the poten-
tial benefits of open services innovation through citizen engagement
and citizen reuse of published open data. Here prior research on open
data portals failed to investigate the impact of open data policy, with
the exception of Thorsby et al. (2016).
Second, our key finding on the importance of dedicated open data
portal investment at the local government level indicates resource com-
mitment and resource allocation by government leaders also as impor-
tant and necessary for facilitating open data portal service capability
development over time. It appears that outsourcing open data publica-
tion to either the state or the federal government open data portals
was not positively associated with the enhanced open data portal ser-
vice capabilities over time. However, outsourcing maybe a legitimate
decision, particularly for smaller local governments given their resource
constraints and lack of expertise in this emerging area. Similarly, in their
study of a regression analysis of 36 open data portals in American cities,
Thorsby et al. (2016, p. 7) concluded: “Results from this study on the
features of open data portals in American cities found city population
size (level of resources) was a critical factor on all three of the depen-
dent variables: the number of datasets listed in the portal, the different
types of dataset content and the Overall Index (portal features and con-
tent types together).” Finally, our longitudinal cross-sector analysis
methodology in examining open data portal service capabilities provid-
ed new insights on the dynamically changing nature of open data portal
service capability research which could not have done in the previous
studies that analyzed open data portals.
6. Conclusion and policy recommendations
The adoption of open data policies and the implementation of open
data portals is still new. In consequence, there remains the lack of em-
pirical research on the impact of open data policies (Ubaldi, 2013;
Zuiderwijk & Janssen, 2014) and on the impact of supply-side open
data portal service capabilities on attracting and engaging citizens/por-
tal users in exploring open data and exploiting open data reuse, data an-
alytics tools, and other entrepreneurial data services that are available
on open data portals for open services innovation. Furthermore, despite
the increasing supply of big data such as geospatial data we found in our
study sample, the existing open data policy frameworks failed to ad-
dress the emergence of big data challenges (Bertot et al., 2014). Finally,
some of the existing open data policy frameworks empirically examined
open data policies at various levels of government, they did not examine
open data portals. In consequence, various authors recognized the need
for an empirical analysis of open data portal services and capabilities
(Linders, 2013; Kassen, 2013; Petychakis et al., 2014 and Carrasco &
Sobrepere, 2015).
This study was motivated by these observed knowledge gaps. In this
longitudinal cross-sector analysis study from 2015 to 2016, we
 A.T. Chatfield, C.G. Reddick / Government Information Quarterly xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
empirically analyzed Australia's twenty largest local governments se-
lected based on the official Estimated Resident Population (ERP) values
(Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2015). We found the large variation
across their supply-side open data portal service capabilities and open
data portal service capability development practices, by measuring the
number of published datasets, the type of machine-readable data for-
mats, open data policy intensity, and entrepreneurial data portal ser-
vices for meaningful engagement of citizens/portal users in open data
reuse.
Over the longitudinal period of two data collection points, we found
two interesting factors that clearly distinguish the two groups: the “pol-
icy” group of 7 and the “non-policy” group of 13. One is open data policy
intensity that focuses not only the internal-focused goals such as gov-
ernment transparency and operational efficiency but also the exter-
nal-oriented goals such as citizen engagement and open innovation
through the reuse of open data. Another is the government's decision
to develop and implement its own dedicated open data portal rather
than to outsource data publication to either a state or the federal gov-
ernment open data portal. These findings indicate that open data policy
intensity and open data portal investment are the important predictors
of the successful open data portal service capability development, both
of which are political/institutional factors, not technological factors. This
has important implications for the government which intends to en-
hance government openness through open data provision. Our longitu-
dinal cross-sector analysis results indicate the importance of the
government's commitment to openness by continuous development
of its data portal service capabilities. As discussed in the Section 2,
Chesbrough (2011, p. 87) argues that “openness” in the context of
open services innovation broadly refers to as “ways of sharing with
others and inviting their participation.”
From this study there are three important policy recommendations
that should be mentioned.
• Local governments should develop and increase the intensity of open
data policies since this spurs greater innovation and generally more 4
star rated datasets being placed online.
• Local governments should try to invest in their own open government
data portals as opposed to outsourcing to other levels of government.
In some cases outsourcing may be a good short-term solution given
lack of fiscal resources, however, our results clearly show having a
local online presence clearly makes a difference in engaging local cit-
izens with local OGD over time.
• There are economies of scales of publishing open data on these portals
since those local governments that publish first seem to be much fur-
ther ahead of the laggards. Therefore, local governments are encour-
aged to be leaders in proactively sharing public data through their
own open government data portals.
However, our research has inherent limitations for three reasons.
Firstly, our Australian local government context may not be applicable
to other local governments in nations in which neither the national
nor state governments adopted open data policies and implemented
open data portals unlike Australia. Secondly, our longitudinal cross-sec-
tor study did not conduct case interviews on demand-side responses
such as citizen engagement and open innovation outcomes with the
sample of twenty local governments, except Greater Geelong City Coun-
cil with which we conducted a post-hoc hour-long interview to gain
new insights into demand-side responses such as citizen engagement
and open services innovation beyond government hackathon ideas
competitions. Third, we examined a limited number of indicators of
the capabilities of these local governments and their open data portals.
There are obviously other indicators that could have been explored,
with many internal to the government organizations; these could be
further investigated in the context of case interviews. Our future re-
search directions need to address these limitations by investigating
Please cite this article as: Chatfield, A.T., & Reddick, C.G., A longitudinal cross-sector analysis of open data portal service capability: The case of
Australian local governments, Government Information Quarterly (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2017.02.004
11
citizen-centric government services offering (Reddick, 2007) that
could stimulate citizen-centric open innovation (Vigoda-Gadot,
Shoham, Schwabsky, & Ruvio, 2008; Reddick, 2011) in which citizens
and learning orientation may play a moderating role (Salge & Vera,
2012).
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31(1), 17–29.
Akemi Takeoka Chatfield, M.B.A. and Ph.D. in Business Administration (MIS & Manage-
ment Sciences summa cum laude) from Texas Tech University in the U.S. Dr. Chatfield is di-
rector, E-Government & E-Governance Research Group and senior lecturer in Information
Technology with the School of Computing and Information Technology within the Faculty
of Engineering and Information Sciences at University of Wollongong in Australia. Her re-
search interests include networked organizations, network technology benefits realiza-
tion, social media and government, social network analysis, big data analytics, and open
data policy. She published in Journal of Management Information Systems, European Journal
of Information Systems, Journal of Information Systems Frontier, Communications of the ACM,
Data Base, Information Technology for Development, International Journal of Electronic Gover-
nance, Electronic Journal of E-Government, International Journal of Public Administration in
the Digital Age, Government Information Quarterly, Information Polity, Social Sciences Com-
puter Review, and Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
Christopher G. Reddick, Ph.D. in Political Science from University of Sheffield, U.K. Profes-
sor Reddick is Chair of the Department of Public Administration within the College of Pub-
lic Policy at The University of Texas at San Antonio. He is Editor-in-Chief, International
Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age and Series Editor, Public Administration
and Information Technology. His research interests include big data and big data analytics
in government, citizen-centric e-governance, social media policy and use in government
and open data policy. Professor Reddick published more than 85 journal articles and 10
books. He published in Public Administration Review, Government Information Quarterly, In-
ternational Journal of E-Government, Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy,
Information Polity, Social Sciences Computer Review, and Journal of Homeland Security
and Emergency Management.

Please cite this article as: Chatfield, A.T., & Reddick, C.G., A longitudinal cross-sector analysis of open data portal service capability: The case of
Australian local governments, Government Information Quarterly (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2017.02.004