Integrating across sustainability, political, and administrative spheres : a longitudinal study of actors’ engagement in open data ecosystems in three canadian cities

Over the last decade, cities around the world have embraced the open data movement by launching open data portals. To successfully derive benefits from these initiatives, engagement from a wide range of individual and organizational actors is needed. These actors undertake activities supporting data publication and dissemination within open data ecosystems. We aim to enhance the IS community’s contribution to the open data movement by conducting a longitudinal, qualitative archival analysis of open data initiatives in three Canadian cities: Edmonton, Toronto, and Montreal. Combining two complementary models of open data and information ecosystems, we explore how actors engage within and across the sustainability, political, and administrative spheres to influence the success of open data initiatives. Our findings suggest most actors operate within a single sphere, but some are able to integrate across two or all three spheres to become ecosystem anchors. Through these sphere-spanning efforts, ecosystem anchors help to shape the evolution of open data initiatives. This research provides a theoretically grounded explanation of processes within successful open data initiatives and suggests new directions for practice