Beyond Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration? A Reflection on the Dimensions of Open Government

Open government has become an important strategy for administrative reform in the last decade incentivizing many countries around the world to design and implement initiatives related to information access, transparency, participation, and collaboration. However, there is limited clarity about the definition of open government and its main conceptual dimensions. Based on a review of the existing literature, this article proposes a framework to understand and represent the multidimensionality of open government as a socio-technical phenomenon. The paper identifies five dimensions: information availability, transparency, participation, collaboration, and information technology. We argue that these dimensions could inform both researchers and practitioners of open government by not only providing guidance for analyses of open government as a whole, but also the examination of the individual dimensions and their relationships in specific initiatives. This article also presents summaries of the articles included in this special issue and highlights some of their characteristics and their use of the aforementioned open government dimensions.