RTI on Wheels: A mobile van to spread the word about RTI is traveling for 10 days through Jammu and Kashmir in India, sponsored by NGO Gujarat Pahel, according to Free Press article.
Open Data: “Putting Open Data to Work for Communities,” a report by the US National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, a network of local organizations that collect, organize, and use neighborhood data to tackle issues in their communities.
Technology: The Transparency and Accountability Initiative issues “a practical new guide for transparency campaigners planning and executing technology projects,” written by Dirk Slater, a co-organizer of Transparency and Accountability Initiative’s TABridge project. ‘Fundamentals for Using Technology in Transparency and Accountability Organisations’ “presents clear, step-by-step guidance to the key phases in a technology project, from defining your strategy, to spending wisely, to tracking outcomes. “
Transparency Research: “Beyond Stuff: Capacity as a Relational Concept” by Richard Mallett in a World Bank blog post.
Thinking relationally about capacity means seeing capacity as a systems issue. You might have the best-trained staff and the most well-equipped organizations, but without understanding what’s going on between them (information sharing, coordination, planning, delivery chains, feedback loops, the informal governance of decision-making and action), you’re going to miss out on how stuff really works. A lot of the thinking about capacity within our field is reductive. Thinking relationally, and getting to grips with how systems function, is how we start interpreting and managing capacity problems in a way that takes us way beyond technical skills and tangible stuff.
Open Data: An overview of open knowledge efforts in Latin America by two young Berliners Alex (a software developer from Spain) and Margo (a graduate in European politics from France) who traveled around the world for one year to meet people and organizations working actively in open knowledge related projects, documenting them on their website. (Links in the post noted above.)
United States: The US Environmental Protection Agency “is testing and piloting a suite of e-discovery tools to both bolster its litigation support and to help the agency respond to an upsurge of Freedom of Information Act requests,” according to a report in GCN.
T-Shirt: Declassified FBI File T-Shirt. “Image is of a declassified FBI file on Pablo Picasso, which is mostly censored and creates a cool abstract pattern.” Declassified FBI file printed in black ink printed on American Apparel’s Plum Heather or Asphalt Grey. Also available on Alternative Apparel’s Destroyed tee in Antique White.
Featured Request: The US website MuckRock, through a Freedom of Information Act request, obtained a copy of a manual the FBI put together with a list of basically every single piece of internet slang, as described in an Mediate article with funny examples.
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