Making All Voices Count: The 28 winners are announced in a contest for cutting-edge projects to boost government and citizen engagement. Winners include a group planning to develop an app for searching pubic data worldwide, a project to engage with graffiti artists to spread data-based information in Nairobi’s slums, a project to construct a pharmaceutical pricing reference guide, and another to “to research the role of anonymity in giving citizens a voice.”
Two approved projects involve FOI:
The Carter Center seeks to enhance Freedom of Information (FOI) laws in Indonesia, Uganda and Nigeria by applying their Access to Information Implementation Assessment tool to identify implementation gaps. Awarded £39,891.
Enhancing the Implementation of Liberia’s Freedom of Information Act: mySociety seeks to promote awareness and use of Liberia’s Freedom of Information (FOI) act, which despite guaranteeing effective, equitable and inexpensive exercise of the right to freedom is infrequently used by citizens. Awarded £99,765.
Making All Voices Count is a global initiative that supports innovation, scaling, and research to deepen existing innovations and help harness new technologies to enable citizen engagement and government responsiveness. Making All Voices Count is supported by the U.K Department for International Development (DFID), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Open Society Foundations (OSF) and Omidyar Network (ON), and is implemented by a consortium consisting of Hivos (lead organisation), the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and Ushahidi.
OGP Awards: The Open Government Partnership announces the Open Government Awards competition for 2014, focused on the theme of citizen engagement. As explained here, each OGP participating country is invited to submit one application to this year’s competition, and the initial registration deadline is May 30, 2014.
Transparency and Accountability: See the think pieces and participants’ reports from the second TALEARN workshop, held March 12-15 in Jakarta. Hosted by the London-based Transparency and Accountability Initiative, “TALEARN brings together people from across disciplines to share learning, and to work collectively on new ideas and shared challenges in transparency and accountability.”
Transparency and Accountability: A blog post in which Duncan Green asks three “transparency gurus” – Peter Eigen, Rakesh Rajani and Rosemary McGhee – to discuss the limits of transparency.
Development Transparency: According to an April 17 Open Government Partnership blog post, “Open Government, Open Data and Civic Engagement, as mechanisms for increased transparency and accountability, were identified as crucial elements for enhancing development effectiveness, in the context of the High-Level Meeting of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation.”
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