Public Communication in the Processes of Transparency and Accountability in the Era of Open Data

Transparency and accountability in the public sector are currently at the center of the communication policies by public administrations in different institutional contexts. With the development of ICT and the prospective of open data and open government that invests in recent years the renewal of the public system in various countries and supranational realities (such as Europe), accountability seems to find new impulse. Public institutions tend to make available to the public information concerning the processes of administration, the manner of use of public goods and resources.

At the same time, in the Network Society (Castells 2008, Jenkins 2006) each institution is called upon to deal with the demand for transparency and participation of citizens, which use for this purpose increasingly the Internet and social media (new forms of civic engagement ) (Castells 2010 to 2012, Dahlgren 2010).

Observing the ways in which public authorities are transitioning towards open data (through the analysis of significant cases at the level of local and national governments) emerge strengths and weaknesses, including a problem of attribution of sense to produced data, at the macro level (institutions) and the micro level (individual and associated citizens).

Public communication plays a crucial role because it can accompany open government, through a contextualization and adequate communication of the data that goes beyond the mere publication.

This effort, associated with the ability of individual and associated citizens to practice a selection of data, it is possible the emergence of  the construction of sense that it favors the desired micro-macro link (Ardigò 1998, Mazzoli 2001, 2012), the possible compatibilization between macro-systems and environment, life-worlds.