FOI in Africa: An overview on Africa Check by Karen Mohan, a specialist in media law policy and advocacy at the Media Institute of Southern Africa.
India: A long Reuters overview of RTI in India.
Open Data: A lengthy article in TechPresident by Miranda Neubauer on the publication of more datasets in New York city. “But what matters more to New York City open data advocates than the absolute number of the datasets is their quality and values: creating a transparent process of releasing the data, making the data machine-readable and prioritizing release of data sets in high demand.”
India: The Commonwealth Human Right Initiative has done a preliminary analysis of open datasets relating to rape from NCRB’s compilation. Also see a media report on the findings.
Parliamentary Openness: An initial draft of the Global Parliamentary Openness Survey, a Legislative Openness Working Group research project that will gather information on parliamentary openness practices in national level parliaments around the world. The survey can be viewed here. “The link will bring you to a live version of the survey, but please note that we are not yet collecting information as the survey will continue to change based on your feedback. We provided this link as an illustrative example of what they survey may look like once finalized.”
Employment: Consultants are being sought for an open government data initiatives project in Latin America and Asia by the Division for Public Administration and Development Management of the UN Public Administration Programme.
United States: The Sunlight Foundation has compiled information on the accessibility of executive orders issued by state governors. The “vast majority” of governors’ offices make this information available to the public in an organized manner, but not always on a timely basis.
Open Data: The US Sunlight Foundation faults the G7 countries for failing to fulfill their open data commitments in a two-part series by James Chan.
Part 1: G8 Open Data Charter Action Plan: Open data by default, but you may have to pay
Part 2: What can we learn from the G8 Open Data Charter Action Plan?
Right to Be Forgotten: A Google advisory council is seeking “public comments and evidence” on the right to be forgotten ruling via a webform. The deadline for filing submissions is Aug. 11. See article on this in TechCrunch
Specific questions the council says it’s going to be considering include:
What is the nature and delineation of a public figure’s right to privacy?
How should we differentiate content in the public interest from content that is not?
The council also is planning a series of public meetings.
United States: The Open Data Network was just launched by Socrata, “The Data Experience Company.” based in Seattle, Wash. “Housing” the first topic in its trademarked Open Data Network site.
New Addition to Freedominfo.org FOI Quotes List: “I hope also that real Swaraj will come not by the acquisition of authority by a few but by the acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when abused.” Mahatma Gandhi 1925. Swaraj is translated as self rule or freedom. The quotes is on page 114 of Selections from Gandhi, 1957, Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, and is here online.
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