Open Government Guide: The right to information chapter in the new Open Government Guide suggestions of RTI-related commitments that countries could make in the context of the Open Government Partnership. Examples and other resources are provided.
The 19-chapter guide was prepared by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative. T/AI is a donor collaborative that includes the Ford Foundation, Hivos, the International Budget Partnership, the Omidyar Network, the Open Society Foundations (OSF), the Revenue Watch Institute, the UK Department for International Development and the William and Flora Hewett Foundation.
Open Data: The Open Knowledge Foundation supports over 20 active and incubating working groups, domain specific groups promoting, advocating for and building openness in their respective fields.
European Union: A consultation and a Nov. 25 public hearing by the European Commission are being held “to contribute to the adoption of an EU-wide approach to licensing terms, charging practices, and publication of high-value datasets.”
Three main questions will be discussed at the hearing:
1. Which types of data should be made available for re-use across Europe in order to ensure the greatest impact? 2. How should public bodies charge for data re-use in order to recoup their costs and get a “reasonable return on investment”? 3. What are the best methods for implementing standard licenses on data and ensuring inter-operability with national licensing regimes?
For more information, see the agenda or contact Styliani Chartampila at cnect-g3@ec.europa.eu.
Open Data: The Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative seeks to support global efforts to make agricultural and nutritionally relevant data available, accessible, and usable for unrestricted use worldwide. The initiative focuses on building high-level policy and public and private institutional support for open data. The initiative encourages collaboration and cooperation among existing agriculture and open data activities, without duplication, and brings together all stakeholders to solve long-standing global problems.
Transparency Research: A paper by Greg Michener and Katherine Bersch offers some bright lines on what is and is not transparency. Full text not free.
Abstract
Recent scholarship on transparency has been voluminous, and transparency policies continue to garner international adherents through global initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership. Yet extant scholarship has failed to address the empirical parameters for what constitutes ‘transparency’ and what does not. This lacuna gives way to misuses and abuses, jeopardizing the analytical utility of the term and the integrity of so-called ‘transparency’ policies. This article provides a framework and a vocabulary for identifying and evaluating transparency, which depends on two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions: the visibility of information, and its inferability – the ability to draw accurate conclusions from it. By disaggregating these two conditions for identifying transparency, this article provides a framework for the emerging research agenda on the quality of transparency.
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