This research project is funded by the City of Vienna WU Jubilee Fund, and aims to improve our understanding of ethics in new digitalized citizen participation, and, in particular, how open data can assist in this process. We are interested in the perceptions of those actors who are expected to be beneficiaries of digital services and processes. Motivated by the literature stream of open government, we are interested in citizens’ evaluation of the role of transparency in digital citizen participation. We pay special attention to ethical aspects of public service delivery. We formulated the following research questions at the core of this research project:

(1) Which factors are influential for citizens to engage in public service co-engineering, and in particular for co-engineering processes that safeguard basic ethical principles in public service delivery (e.g. privacy, transparency, inclusion, etc.)?;

(2) How relevant is open data in this process, and in which format is it most valuable to support a citizen co-engineering process?

(3) What are other relevant contextual factors and citizens’ characteristics that influence the (perceived) value of open data in citizen co-engineering processes?