Video: See a presentation by Associated Press investigative journalist Martha Mendoza on the importance of government transparency. “Drawing on her own experience employing the U.S.’s FOIA, and similar international laws, Mendoza demonstrated how latent information, made available publicly and contextualized, can affect change from the smallest municipal government to the highest levels of international institutions,” according to a published description.
United States: Bloomberg reporter Danielle Ivory writes that at least 25 federal agencies are outsourcing parts of the FOIA process.
United Kingdom: Two new guides to using FOI in the UK, cited in FOI Man blog post. The researchers of University College London’s Constitution Unit produced Making Freedom of Information Requests: A Guide for Academic Researchers, by Gabrielle Bourke, Ben Worthy and Robert Hazell. Meanwhile, another guide, primarily aimed at journalists and campaigners, has been produced by the entrepreneurial journalists of Request Initiative. FOIA Without the Lawyer: Freedom, Information and the Press by Brendan Montague and Lucas Amin is available as an e-book from Amazon.
Publication: “Government Transparency. Impacts and Unintended Consequences,” by Tero Erkkila, Lecturer in Political Science at the Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland, has been published by Palgrave Macmillan. “This book argues that the transnational discourse of transparency promotes potentially contradictory policy ideas that can lead to unintended consequences and paradoxes in governance and accountability. In analyzing the institutional developments in the Nordic context, the study claims that there is a new economic understanding of access to government information as a result of the policies related to transparency.”
Publication: A new book, “In The State of Citizen Participation in America,” editors Hindy Lauer Schachter and Kaifeng Yang (2012), includes a chapter, “The Usability of Government Information: The necessary link between transparency and participation,” by Yuguo Liao, a doctoral student at the School of Public Affairs and Administration, Rutgers-Newark.
The abstract says: “This study explores the importance of government information usability in promoting citizen participation in public administration. Rather than an emphasis on the volume of information released by government, the notion of information usability calls for greater emphasis on information quality. To begin, we examine the definitions of transparency and government information usability. A set of criteria on useable government information are identified: accurate, accessible, complete, understandable, timely, and free or low cost. These criteria are applied to two cases: USAspending.gov and the 1-800-MEDICARE helpline. We develop a typology illustrating the relationship between government openness and information usability. The typology is a combination of the range of information usability (i.e. quality information) and information quantity. Finally, how information usability links transparency and citizen participation is discussed. This study bolsters the argument that the ultimate purpose of releasing government information is to enable the public to hold government accountable.
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