Why Should You Believe in Open Data? : A Document Study Examining Persuasion Rhetoric of OGD Benefits

• The rhetoric related to benefits of Open Government Data (OGD) seems to lack anchor in practice affecting practitioners and empirical evidence restraining academia. This rhetoric could be hard to see for those already persuaded. As such, the rhetoric could contain inconsistencies that are based more on myths than facts, contributing to the slow pace of OGD development. OGD is sometimes based on dogmatic rhetoric that is overly simplistic, which hides significant benefits and blocks potential audiences from seeing the practical applications of OGD. The purpose of the present study was to analyse the persuasiveness of present OGD arguments from a rhetorical perspective to identify rhetorical patterns. We conducted desktop research, investigating the rhetoric of eight websites emphasising OGD benefits. Our findings include four common patterns of the rhetoric involving persuasion and dissuasion. The rhetoric contains paradoxes of promises and discoveries, which we categorised as the grand quest, promised opportunities, tribal solidarity, and the silver bullet patterns. A further finding was two mythical paradoxes: (1) promises versus discovery and (2) proving while arguing.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap -- Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications -- Information Studies (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Systemvetenskap, informationssystem och informatik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Information Systems (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Dissuasion

Mythical paradox

Open government data

Persuasion

Rhetoric

e-government

Data development

Open datum

Open Data

Library and Information Science

Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap

Library and Information Science

Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap

Information Systems

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)