Commentary: Martin Tisne writes in his blog about why open government groups are not working better together? Much abbreviated answers: different languages, etc.; competition for limited resources; and “coordination, partnership is hard work!” He asks what can be done.
Open Contracting: A blog post from Open Contracting on developing standards.
Germany: The FOIA law is a success, Information Commissioner Peter Schaar said in a Zeit interview, but has too many exceptions.
Bulgaria: The 2012 annual report on the state of access to information in Bulgaria is now in English.
Nigeria: The National Orientation Agency announced plans to translate the FOI law into the languages of Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba.
Mexico: The Mexican access law helped a journalist research a prize-winning story on Walmart, according to an article by the Knight Center.
Open Data: Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web Foundation (Web Foundation) and inventor of the Web, unveiled details of “the first ever in-depth study into how the power of open data could be harnessed to tackle social challenges in the developing world.” The 14 country study is funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and will be overseen by the Web Foundation.
Separately, the April 29 reply deadline is approaching for a Web Foundation discussion on having a central entry point to Open Data related resources at a neutral source, the Open Data Directory (ODD).
Funding: Global Integrity announced the five innovative ideas selected to receive up to $10,000 from the TESTING 1 2 3: The Global Integrity Innovation Fund.
Simply Visualizing Politics is a dynamic visualization of changes in the views of Macedonian politicians over time.
Hidden Agenda is a photo-based storytelling platform that seeks to make public top government officials’ daily schedules in Spain.
Vertiza.org is a real-time corruption alert system that leverages automated “mashups” of disparate datasets to potentially reveal corruption-prone patterns.
Accessing Urban Development Regulations is an online platform that will house a collection of pertinent regulatory documents for urban development in Serbia.
Police-Citizens Protocol is an approach designed to mitigate corruption in law enforcement in Mexico by distilling existing sets of complex law enforcement rules, which police officers in Mexico City are expected to follow, into simpler versions that citizens can invoke when approached unlawfully by law enforcement officers.
Filed under: What's New