Definition of Open Government Services

Based on the literature, the different definitions share several aspects:

- Openness: OGS include a visible effort to publish elements and components of the service (data, service components, decision support), with respect to traditional eGovernment. Increased openness aims to ensure accountability and enable collaboration (see next point). Openness can refer to the publication of open data that were not available before; or to the production of reusable software objects that can be re-composed as in the concept of Service-Oriented Architecture.

- Collaboration: OGS include is a recognition that government should not only aim at fulfilling societal and economic needs by direct service provision, but should enable and deliberately pursue the collaboration of third parties in order to deliver added value services: citizen, companies, research centres, NGOs etc. This can include services fully designed and provided by private players without the awareness of government but that help solving issues related to public services, such as in the case of Fixmystreet.com.

- Technology: OGS are fundamentally reliant on digital technology to deliver the services. Digital technology is used to provide disruptive innovation in the way services are delivered and is by definition collaborative, through open data, open web tools or collaborative platforms.

It’s important to notice that this definition does not allow for black and white distinction. Some forms of openness and collaboration are present in every government services: traditional e-government online services, for example, shift part of the weight to users by allowing them to compile data directly online.

What characterises OGS is a deliberate, declared and purposeful effort to increase openness and collaboration through technology in order to deliver increased public value.

All these three components must be present for a service to be classified as OGS. As such, are excluded from OGS:

- Traditional e-government initiatives for online or mobile service provision.

- Live participatory initiatives such as town hall meetings.

On the other hand, OGS include:

- Both public service provision and involvement in policy decision

- Services to citizens and services to companies

- Services pertaining to all branches of government (legislative, executive, judiciary)

- Services where third parties play a different role: from lead, to contributor, to simple input in the design

Finally, there are aspects that we propose to include in the OGS definition, despite being not designed to increase the collaboration between government and third parties. We define these as non-core OGS:

- Services delivered by citizens or private sector without any forms of government initiative, and that do not even rely on open government data, but that help addressing the needs typically addressed by public services. This includes many services built by citizens with the support of other citizens such as Fixmystreet.com and PatientOpinion.org.

- Government initiative exclusively aiming at increasing collaboration within government, such as social networks of civil servants and inter-agency knowledge sharing platforms. This forms of intra-government collaboration are mentioned in different policy agendas, such as the EU Public Sector Innovation Group which “co-creation with other parts of government”. (Christian Bason et al., 2013) and the Collaboration aspect as mentioned in the US Open Government directive.