Open Contracting: The Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) announces a set of open contracting principles. Dennis Santiago, Executive Director of the Government Procurement Policy Board of the Philippines and OCP steering group member, is quoted:
Transparency and Openness of government transactions are best manifested through the procurement information and contract data sets they make available to the public. However, the gamut of information and data available is so immense that it becomes tedious, confusing, irrelevant and difficult to understand. Simply making the information available may not address transparency and openness to the fullest extent.
Funding: The Knight Foundation announces a $4 million grant to the Sunlight Foundation “to expand its data sets, create apps and products that engage the general public (not just policy wonks) and help make government at all levels more open and participatory.”
Open Data: The state of New York releases provisional open data guidelines for state agencies and public authorities to participate in Open.ny.gov. The guidelines will help with identifying, reviewing, and prioritizing state data for publication.
Tunisia: The Centre for Law and Democracy is issues an analysis of the freedom of expression and access to information provisions in the new draft Constitution for Tunisia.
Open Company Data Index: Countries are evaluated in the Open Company Data Index, maintained by OpenCorporates in partnership with the World Bank Institute.
What’s in a Name?: Mark Heller of Global Integrity posts an article titled: “So What Should We Call the Open [Everything] Movement?”
Commentary: The transparency revolution needs coordination, a blog post by Andrew Palmer.
Research: A DemocracySpot summary by Tiago Peixoto of research on whether transparency breeds trust in government. It concludes: “It may even be that transparency leads – in the long run – to increased trust: a great way to sell transparency to governments. But if we want to walk the talk of evidence-based policymaking, we may consider dropping the trust rhetoric. At least for now.”
United States: The Center for Effective Government writes that a new letter by Department of Justice officials “reveals the department is engaged in limited enforcement activities under the Freedom of Information Act.”
Filed under: What's New