Purpose: The opening of government data is high on the policy agenda of governments worldwide. However, data release faces barriers due to limited support of civil servants, whereas the literature neglects civil servants' role in opening data. This paper aims at understanding why civil servants can be reluctant to support the disclosure of data. The authors developed a model to explain civil servants' behavioral intention to open data. Design/methodology/approach: The authors test a series of hypotheses by collecting and analyzing survey data from 387 civil servants and by applying multivariate hierarchical regression. Findings: The results indicate the factors influencing the behavior of civil servants. Social influences, performance expectancy, data management knowledge and risks have a significant influence. Personal characteristics control these effects. Research limitations/implications: Caution is needed to generalize the findings towards the support to open data provision by civil servants. Though the analyzed sample was limited to Brazil, other countries and cultures might yield different outcomes. Larger and more diversified samples might indicate significant effects on variables not found in this research. Practical implications: The insights can be used to develop policies for increasing the support of civil servants towards governmental data disclosure. Originality/value: This study suggests factors of influence to civil servants' behavior intentions to disclose governmental data. It results in a model of factors, specifically for their behavioral intention at the individual level.@en

Les administrations adoptent de plus en plus des politiques d’ouverture des données. Toutefois, les agents publics jugent difficile de respecter ces nouvelles politiques. Les jeux peuvent les aider à pratiquer l’ouverture des données et à modifier leur comportement en faveur d’une plus grande ouverture. Dans cet article, nous évaluons l’effet d’un jeu dans le cadre d’une expérimentation qui compare, avant et après l’intervention, plusieurs facteurs ayant une incidence sur l’ouverture des données. Les bénéfices observés sont inattendus à plusieurs égards. Le jeu a permis de partager des connaissances dans les domaines de la gestion, de la confidentialité et de la sécurité des données, de modifier de manière significative les bénéfices perçus, et de faire évoluer de manière positive l’intention de comportement. Remarques à l’intention des praticiens Le comportement des agents publics a une incidence sur la façon dont les politiques publiques sont mises en œuvre. Pour beaucoup, la diffusion de données publiques par les administrations est fondamentale pour accroître la transparence publique et la participation des citoyens, et pour ouvrir de nouvelles perspectives économiques. Les jeux peuvent influer sur l’attitude des agents publics, et donc modifier les décisions des administrations. Transmettre des connaissances et fournir des enseignements tirés de nouvelles expériences peut influencer l’attitude des agents publics à l’égard des données ouvertes. Les administrations peuvent également utiliser les jeux à cette fin.@en

Governments are increasingly using games for civic engagement, decision making, and education. Serious gaming is a type of game that has often been advocated as a means for changing the attitude of its players and can be used for changing the attitude of civil servants. However, the relationship between games and attitude change in civil servants remains unexplored. This paper aims at identifying factors leading to attitude change of civil servants. As hardly any paper is focused on civil servants' attitude change through games, the authors broaden their research to attitude change through games in general. Out of 483 documents, 19 reference papers were analyzed in detail. Eighty-one games were found, and more than 13 different theories were identified containing 30 different influencing factors, which were found mostly to be unrelated and context-dependent. The conceptual dispersion between studies indicates that the resulting overview of factors is a first step towards creating a uniform theory. The results can help governments to design better games.@en

The adoption of open data policy-making by governments is limited due to different types of constraints. Civil servants are reluctant to open their data to the public for many reasons. The lack of knowledge of benefits that can be produced by the release of data and the overestimation of risks and operational complexity seems to decrease their willingness to support the opening of data. The idea that a serious game intervention can change awareness of participants in different domains is already known. Yet, games are domain dependent and concepts differ per domain. A game has never been used for the emerging domain of open data in which civil servants are operating in a bureaucratic environment having a risk-averse culture and strict institutional rules. A role-playing game prototype was designed for civil servants to experience open data policy-making. This paper analyses its first results aiming at changes of perception for the participants of the game and aims to understand the changes in behavior of civil servants that played it. For some participants, the game influenced their attitude, whereas others were not influenced. Suggesting that different approaches might be necessary for changing the attitude of different groups.

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Game sessions consist of three phases: briefing, gameplay, and debriefing, with the latter being considered the most important feature of games. Nevertheless, given that games are considered by many to be more of an artistic form rather than a scientific artifact, a question that rises is: Can game sessions in general and debriefing in particular be analyzed and performed in a rigorous scientific way? In other words, can they be consistently structured, given the different characteristics of games, and can clear criteria on what would constitute a successful game session and debriefing be defined? The answer to these questions is yes. Yet, it remains a challenge to extract the knowledge of experts, which resides to a large extent in the tacit knowledge spectrum. Hence, the aim of this paper is to shed some light in this tacit knowledge possessed by experts and to gain understanding on why certain practices are more prone to success than others as well as bring into the surface other practices that have remained well hidden. In order to accomplish this goal, three rounds of interviews were conducted.@en

Governments are increasingly using games for civic engagement, decision making, and education. Serious gaming is a type of game that has often been advocated as a means for changing the attitude of its players and can be used for changing the attitude of civil servants. However, the relationship between games and attitude change in civil servants remains unexplored. This paper aims at identifying factors leading to attitude change of civil servants. As hardly any paper is focused on civil servants' attitude change through games, the authors broaden their research to attitude change through games in general. Out of 483 documents, 19 reference papers were analyzed in detail. Eighty-one games were found, and more than 13 different theories were identified containing 30 different influencing factors, which were found mostly to be unrelated and context-dependent. The conceptual dispersion between studies indicates that the resulting overview of factors is a first step towards creating a uniform theory. The results can help governments to design better games.

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Open data policies are increasingly being adopted by governments. However, civil servants find it challenging to comply with open data policies. Gaming can help civil servants to practise opening data and can change their behaviour to support the opening of more data. In this article, the effect of playing a game is evaluated in an experiment in which several factors that influence the opening of data are compared before and after the game. The benefits appeared in unexpected ways and areas. Data management, privacy and security knowledge was transferred using the game, the perception of benefits showed significant changes, and behavioural intention was positively affected. Points for practitioners: Civil servants’ behaviour influences how public policies are enacted. The release of open data by governments is related by many as crucial for increasing public transparency and civic participation, and generating new economic opportunities. Games can influence the attitude of civil servants and, consequently, change governments’ decisions. Transferring knowledge and providing insights from new experiences can influence civil servants’ attitudes to open data. Moreover, governments can use games to influence civil servants’ attitudes.

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The actual opening of government data is done by civil servants operating within their institutional environment. As such, the institutional environment and their behavior towards the opening of data is key to increase the quality and quantity of open data. However, few studies have analyzed the behavior of government professionals towards open data policy. The objective of this paper is to review the existing literature to find the factors that influences civil servants behaviors towards open data. To identify the drivers and barriers, a literature review was performed listing the most cited papers with "open government data"and "barriers"focusing specific at the behavioral related factors. Even with the increasing of research on the topic of open data, still most of the papers focus on user drivers and barriers rather than on provider challenges. Even less studies focus on the civil servants' individual level of factors influencing their support to the release of governmental data. Most barriers found in the literature are related to infrastructural or technical issues. Whereas some individual level behavioral barriers could be found, including culture, lack of individual incentives and misunderstanding the impact of opening data, broader discussions on social norms, lack of education and experience are still missing in the literature. This paper contributes to the need for deeper understanding of the behavioral factors that influences the civil servants to support the opening of data.

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Gaming simulations (games) are increasingly becoming the tool of choice for modeling and understanding the complexity of today's systems. This increased popularity has consequently revealed the weaknesses of games in several areas. These limitations range from inconsistencies on the game design to the unexploited explicit and tacit knowledge that games invoke. This paper focuses on games that do not aim at generalizing the produced knowledge but, instead, at understanding how a system works within a specific context. The first step of the analysis is identifying these limitations based on an extensive literature review. Based on this, different directions that could mitigate or even fully address these limitations are proposed. The paper concludes with a focused research agenda.@en

The design of a new timetable for a railway system is a complex process. Focusing only on the product and the exchange of information between design phases, does not cover the complexity. Strategic actor behaviour and contextual factors are underexposed by research on theory of designing civil infrastructures. Therefore, we investigate the redesign process of the timetable for the Dutch railways from two perspectives: 1) an engineering perspective; 2) an actor and context perspective. To indicate the successes and failures of the redesign process it is characterised using the PSI framework which includes these two perspectives. Several design phases are distinguished and at the transitions misalignments are identified. The misalignments are compared with empirical data to conclude on a set of improvements. Areas perceived as problematic are knowledge transfer between design phases, decomposition of one design phase into several products, and composition of multiple products into one final design.@en

Simulations are the core of every railway system. Changes in the timetable and the infrastructure, or even in the internal processes of a railway company should be, and usually are, first tested through simulations. Given their significance and potential impact, simulations should be primarily validated; validation ensures-at least to some extent-that the returned results are credible and can be used for the intended purpose. This study is a detailed report on two case studies from the railway sector. The aim of this paper is to identify critical factors that can advance or hinder the validity and the effective usage of simulation models.@en

Thirty years of research on validation and verification have returned a plethora of methods and statistical techniques through methodological and case studies. It is, however, this abundance of methods and techniques that poses a major challenge. Due to time and budget constraints, it is impossible to apply all the available methods and techniques in a single study, and as such a careful selection has to be made. This paper builds on two assumptions: a) simulations, real-world systems, methods, and techniques can be defined on the basis of different characteristics and b) certain methods and techniques are more suitable than others for different kinds of simulation studies. The present study aims at identifying the specific characteristics that make certain methods and techniques more effective and more efficient than others, when juxtaposing these with the simulations' and systems' different characteristics. The conclusion will advance a methodology for choosing the most appropriate methods and techniques for validating and/or verifying a simulation.@en