**Abstract**

To hold governments accountable to open government data (GD) standards, public dashboards need to be evaluated in terms of how well they meet public needs. To assist with that effort, this chapter presents a framework and rubric by which public dashboards can be evaluated for their level of good faith implementation. It starts by reviewing challenges to governments sharing data in good faith despite increasing open government data (OGD) policies and laws being put in place globally. Next, it presents a use-case in which the authors explain how they examined a public dashboard in their local context that appeared to be following OGD, but not in good faith, and developed an alternative implementation that appeared to increase the level of good faith. The framework and rubric proposed were used to successfully compare and contrast the level of good faith of both implementations, as well as another public dashboard described in the scientific literature, and to generate recommendations to increase the level of good faith. In conclusion, the utility of this framework and rubric for evaluating and comparing good faith in public implementations of dashboards was demonstrated, and researchers are encouraged to build upon this research to quantify the level of good faith in public dashboards as a way of increasing oversight of OGD compliance.

**Keywords:** public reporting of healthcare data, quality of healthcare, cross infection, public health informatics, data visualization

### **1. Introduction**

There has been a global trend for populations to increasingly hold governments accountable to open government data (OGD) standards [1]. Because of this, governments have undertaken open data projects, such as providing public access to government data through publicly-accessible dashboards [2, 3]. However, government actors also may have an incentive to hide or obscure data, so there are barriers to accessing data for public dashboards [1]. This chapter focuses on the specific problem where governments attempt to demonstrate compliance with OGD standards through the presentation of a public dashboard, while at the same time, appearing to hide or obscure the data it is supposed to represent through poor dashboard design.

Our motivation to tackle this topic comes from our own disappointing experience trying to use a public dashboard implemented as part of OGD standards

established where we live, in Massachusetts in the United States (US). Currently, in general, no standard guidance or recommendations are in place as a process to follow for the development of OGD public dashboards, and no framework or rubric has been proposed to evaluate them. These challenges are barriers to assessing how well public dashboards meet public need, and holding governments accountable for this. The significance of our contribution is that we propose a framework and rubric on which to base the evaluation of how well these public dashboards meet public need. The implication is that the application of this framework and rubric can be further researched in terms of utility in evaluating public dashboards. From this starting point, globally, we can begin to develop scientific consensus on what attributes in evaluate to a good-faith public dashboard implementation, and what the public should rightfully expect from the implementation of an OGD public dashboard.
