The complex societal problems that we face today require unprecedented collaboration and evidence-based decisions. These collaboration processes are further propelled by the datafication of virtually all spheres of public life. To benefit from this, the data needs to be made available to allow for data analytics. Thus, data sharing becomes a crucial aspect of cross-sector collaborations that aim to create and capture value from information. Compared to collaborations where data sharing is not the main goal, data sharing partnerships face a number of novel challenges, such as mitigating data risks, complying with data protection legislation, and ensuring responsible data use. Navigating these waters and achieving data sharing can be challenging for both governments and businesses, as well as other actors. How do organizations from different sectors manage to achieve data sharing for addressing societal challenges? To address this research question, we apply a framework of three models of cross sector social partnerships developed in the field of organization studies to structure the analysis of six cases. Our analysis suggests that to a certain extent the partnership model determines the types of drivers and challenges to sharing data in a partnership. Leveraging the drivers and anticipating these challenges can help organizations be more aware of key terms of the collaboration and the mechanisms that can be used to succeed in their partnership goals.

It has been advocated that sharing business data can generate public value. Still this information sharing often needs to be done on voluntary basis and that often poses major challenges. The main research question addressed in this paper is: How is voluntary information sharing to create public value achieved and what are the drivers and mechanisms to achieve that? While voluntary information sharing to achieve public value is recognized in the eGovernment literature, this literature is limited to understand how such information sharing can be achieved. To address the research question, we borrow a framework of platforms for cross sector social partnerships from organization studies and use it as a conceptual lens to structure the analysis of three case studies where voluntary information sharing was achieved in different domains. Building on the framework and our case analysis, we distinguish three types of information sharing collaborations, namely Resource-dependence platform, Social Issue platform, and Societal Sector platform which allow to distinguish the motivations why parties enter into voluntary information sharing collaborations. Our analysis suggests that while the higher goal of the voluntary information sharing may be the same (i.e. to create public value), parties are driven by different motivations of why they enter into the information sharing collaborations. Furthermore, in each of these different types of collaborations the mechanisms of how the information sharing was achieved, as well as the role the government can play, differ.