Constitutions: The Centre for Law and Democracy has published a comparative report on international and comparative constitutional guarantees of the right to information. The report, “Entrenching RTI: An Analysis of Constitutional Protections of the Right to Information,” is part of CLD’s ongoing work to support right to information reform in Egypt.
Social Media/FOI: An Australia blogger begins an effort to locate all official social media policies. See a blog post by Craig Thomler in which he describes his request for such things as “whether the agency had a staff social media policy and what it contained” and the “register of the social media channels operated by their agency” and “internal briefs and strategies related to the use of social media channels by their agency and staff.”
Media/FOI: Eduardo Bertoni examines the role of the media in supporting and using right to information laws, with Mexico and Argentina as examples. The article appears in the Mexican Law Review.
Photography: The Freedom of Information Center of Armenia is organizing a May 3 Photo Exhibition devoted to the freedom of information and the freedom of expression. “Photos/caricatures that in your opinion capture the application of these two fundamental rights” are being requested.
Government Transparency: A special issue of the International Review of Administrative Sciences has just been released which deals with the subject of government transparency. It is entitled “Government transparency: creating clarity in a confusing conceptual debate” and carries contributions from various prominent researchers in the field of transparency, among them a number from our Open Government in the EU research group based at the Utrecht School of Governance (the Netherlands). Find out more on the website: http://eu-opengovernment.eu/opengovernment/
WikiLeaks: An article by Alasdair Roberts, Suffolk University Law School, in the International Review of Administrative Sciences, argues that advocates of WikiLeaks “have overstated the scale and significance of the leaks. They also overlook many ways in which the simple logic of radical transparency – leak, publish, and wait for the inevitable outrage – can be defeated in practice. WikiLeaks only created the illusion of a new era in transparency. In fact the 2010 leaks revealed the obstacles to achievement of increased transparency, even in the digital age.”
Open Data: A Finnish Institute of London report on the British open data policies and applicability of open data and summary on blog. The key findings include:
- Key to benefits is the quality of user engagement
- Open data and its objectives should be addressed as a part of the freedom-of-information continuum
- The decision to emphasise the release of expenditure data was not ideal: governments do not know best what kind of data people want to have and should aim at releasing it all
- Leadership, trust and IT knowledge are crucial, not only political leadership but within organisations too
- The social and democratic impacts of open data are still unclear and in future there is a need for sector-specific research
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