FOI Posters: “Veteran and award-winning photojournalists who have taken up the challenge of grounding the FOI issue on something more basic – corruption, poverty, and the lack of basic services,” according to a blog post at the Philippines Center for Investigative Journalism.FOI advocates created a special Facebook album where any photographer, amateur or professional, can share images that illustrate the connections between the lack of transparency and the lack of basic services.
FOI Website in Arabic: A website providing Arabic materials and resources about FOI is being started by the Right to Know program of the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression (AFTE), an Egyptian Human rights NGO started in 2006. The contact is Roaa Gharib r.gharib@afteegypt.org.
United States: Media organizations send a letter urging President Obama to be more transparent.
Environmental Transparency: A new publication provides a detailed account of the seminar proceedings from the 13th Informal ASEM Seminar on Human Rights: Human Rights and the Environment held on 21-23 October 2013 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The discussion topics included- access to information, participatory rights and access to justice; actors, institutions and governance; and climate change and human rights implications.
Sustainable Development: “The Road to 2015 Campaign: Open Data for Sustainable Development” has been launched by Publish What You Fund. The Road to 2015 campaign is aimed at getting donors who have committed to publishing aid data to deliver on that promise. “We want transparency and open data for development cooperation to feature as an integral component of the Post-2015 Development Agenda.”
Ireland: A Draft Code of Practice for new Irish ?FOI bill says bodies should publish disclosure logs with name of requester.
Canada: The Edmonton Journal reports that two out of three requesters in Alberta fail to get the information they wanted.
United States: A CIA employee who used the FOI Act to obtain CIA documents was forced out, according to a Washington Post article.
Open Data: A French group launches an effort to create cross-border connections for open data communities. “At Libertic, a French open data community based in Nantes (France), we believe in pragmatism so we have laid down a gauntlet and we will create a bottom-up opportunity for local open data communities in Europe….”
Filed under: What's New