Gaming to improve public policies by engaging local governments in open data policy-making

Open government is a trend of public administration that strengthens the relationship between governments and the public. In open government, the opening of data is the mean to make governmental information accessible for citizens, firms, NGO's and other public bodies. However, one of the challenges is still to get national and local governments to open their data for use. There exist already national governmental policies for open data and research has been developed to support policies and to understand its effects. Opening by default requires that politicians and public servants change their behaviour towards the opening of data. The objective of the present research is to present how games can be used to change the behaviour of local government's civil servants towards providing and using open data to improve the public policies with which they work (overcome cultural resistance against opening data). Therefore, the engagement of civil servants in open data usage will be experimented through games with various interactions forms. Evaluation of what works (and what does not work) will be registered to produce new inputs on how to use gaming exercises on public policies in general and for local Open Data Policies specifically.