A paper presented at the International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government 2016 [CeDEM 2016], Danube University Krems, Krems, Austria (May 19, 2016).

In this paper, Shkabatur and Peled xamined the adoption of an Open Government Data (OGD) transparency policy innovation in five developing countries: Brazil, Kenya, Moldova, Morocco, and the Philippines. They combined an innovative big data analysis of published OGD data with a qualitative study of key moments in the history of adopting the OGD innovation in the five countries of focus. Shkabatur and Peled discovered that in all five countries most OGD activity occurred on a handful of days, usually immediately before or after a standalone “OGD event“ such as a visit by a key World Bank official, or a major policy announcement. In the final section of the paper, the authors paid close attention to Brazil, the only country where the OGD innovation appears to be sustainable thanks to strong domestic OGD demand and an existing, multi-layered, government-transparency legal framework that supports the OGD innovation.