Welcome

Welcome > Introduction to the course > What to expect each week?

• In my research I’m looking at technologies and their impact on the relationship between governments and their constituents.
• Open government is changing and digitizing this relationship.
• Interactions are electronically mediated and technology, organizational, and institutional knowledge is necessary to take advantage of open government.
• In this MOOC we will address questions such as: What are the best practices for opening government? And How can citizens get answers to questions such as ‘how much public money is spent on ensuring the safety in their neighbourhood? And how does their government tackle pollution?’ In this course we look at how you can ensure that citizens can find the answer to these kinds of questions to create a more open, transparent and accountable government.
• Open government and open data are closely related to each other they are distinct.
• Open government is about the relationship between the public and the government and about creating openness, transparency and accountability.
• Open government is about the involvement of the public in all stages of the policy-cycle, whereas open data is about collecting data, publishing and using data.
• My research interests are in the area of open data, and information and data infrastructures.
• In the following five weeks you will explore the challenges, benefits and processes that governments and citizens face when deciding to join the Open Government Movement.
• The overall learning objective of this course is that you are able to describe, analyze and discuss the foundations, objectives, benefits, barriers and potential negative effects of an Open Government.
• Third, one week will be devoted to technical and legal aspects of open government.
• Subsequently, we examine open government and public values.
• The first week of this MOOC addresses our first and second learning objective, namely that 1) the student is able to describe basic concepts related to Open Government, and 2) that the student is able to identify a particular real Open Government case.
• Besides this instruction video, our first week consists of 5 video lectures that will focus on the following topics: What is open government?, technology developments influencing open government, digital government evolution, stakeholders of open government and the policy-making cycle.
• The second week of this MOOC addresses the third and fourth learning objective, namely that the student is able to describe basic concepts related to Open Government Data, and that the student is able to analyze and discuss benefits, barriers and potential negative effects of a particular Open Government case.
• The second week of the MOOC consists of 4 video lectures that will focus on the following topics: What is Open Government Data, Open Government Data processes, considerations when opening government data, and Open Data portals.
• The third week also addresses the third and fourth learning objective, just like week 2, although we focus more on technical and legal aspects of open government.
• The third week of the MOOC consists of 4 video lectures that will focus on the topics of research data analysis, metadata for open government data, legal aspects of open government data, and technologies for open linked data.
• The fourth week of this MOOC addresses the fourth and fifth learning objective, namely 4) that the student is able to analyze and discuss benefits, barriers and potential negative effects of a particular practical open government case, and 5) that the student is able to analyze and discuss public values and best practices related to open government.
• The fourth week of the MOOC consists of 3 video lectures that will focus on open government in relation to transparency, participation and privacy.
• A ProfEd course will be developed about Open Data Governance and Use.
• This is a paid course for professionals, in which we will treat the topics of the Open Government MOOC more in depth, and focus specifically on how to govern and to use open and closed data.
• We would like to welcome you to our course, and wish you good luck and pleasure with your exiting study of the topic of Open Government! “.