Sharing this data has many advantages: it promotes transparency, creates higher efficiency and stimulates innovation. An example of open data is the KNMI. Since they made their data public, countless weather forecasters and websites have been launch. Open Culture Data is also on the rise: digital representations of collection items, knowlge of cultural institutions and digital tours of museums – by sharing this data digitally, art and the associat knowlge are now available to everyone.
Open data allows citizens to monitor more and respond to data that catches their attention. This makes them better inform and motivat to think along.
Informal democracy
The use of social mia and open data contributes to informal democracy . Within informal democracy, everyone how to change a wall light switch yourself? shares everything and everyone has the opportunity to express their opinion about something. Even letters from the municipality are shar online: for example, in early May 2015, a 91-year-old man was refus a stair lift. The argument put forward in the letter: the man in question could have foreseen that he would eventually no longer be able to walk up and down stairs, which would have forc him to move sooner. The letter was shar via Twitter and, with more than 1,000 retweets, became a trending topic in no time . How could the municipality in question be so cruel as to deny the 91-year-old a stair lift? Of course, this is only part of the story that is being told. The municipality therefore stat that ‘the story is more complex than this.’ The story has a happy ending – the man eventually got his stair lift.
How do you, as a government
deal with a world in which social sharing is central and the demand for an informal democracy is growing? I say: involve south africa numbers your target group as much as possible and give them a voice. Preferably both off- and online; there is still about 20 percent of the population that does not use digital possibilities. Using online resources has one major advantage: people can give their opinion wherever and whenever they want. A or while they are on the road. This way, no time is ‘lost’. This promotes accessibility customer contact in service center & digital marketing and plays into informal democracy.