Accountability: One World Trust issues its latest report on accountability (pdf).
The accountability framework methodology and indicators have been changed in 11 key ways. “These range from giving more weight to the role of top level strategy, changing the way in which we score (e.g. moving from a binary to a scaled scoring system), new indicators asking organisations about their quality assurance mechanisms, to finding ways in which to cross-reference our work with data and results from other accountability performance assessments.” A full list is outlined in the report: Pathways to Accountability II: the 2011 revised Global Accountability Framework.
Open Data: A paper by Vivek Kundra, Shorenstein Center Fellow and former U.S. Chief Information Office, “Digital Fuel of the 21st Century: Innovation through Open Data and the Network Effect.”
Climate Science Legal Defense Fund: A fund has been created to defend climate scientists from, among other things, FOI requests; the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, which now has taken on a formal affiliation with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an established nonprofit group offering aid and advice to government whistleblowers and scientists working on environmental issues.
A PEER official said of FOI, “Our main concern is that industry-funded groups and law firms are seeking to criminalize the peer review process by obtaining internal editorial comments of reviewers as a means to impeach or impugn scientists. The grants themselves and the grant reports are public but a federal grant does not transform a university lab into an executive branch agency – which is the ambit of FOIA.”
Survey: John S. Knight Journalism fellows at Stanford University T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Djordje Padejski, founder of the Center for Investigative Reporting in Belgrade, Serbia, are exploring ways to increase FOI law usage and effectiveness worldwide, according to an announcement. To that end, they’re conducting an online FOIA survey, hoping to get “input from power users like journalists, scholars, legal experts, but also the general public.”
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