FOI Training: The right to information is one of six topics in a training program developed by Development Initiatives “to develop and strengthen the skills, capacities and strategic visions of civil society organisations working in the areas of aid and budget analysis, monitoring and advocacy.”
Nigeria: Seember Nyager, CEO at the Public and Private Development Centre, wrote an article about the use of the 2011 FOI law in Nigeria. Separately, an article about the Visual Data Nigeria, a non-profit initiative, has launched a platform to champion the provision of open data in Nigeria.
United States: A new book, by Stanford University Bruce Cain, “Democracy More or Less,” subtitled, “America’s Political Reform Quandary,” argues that American political reform efforts “so often fail to solve the problems they intend to fix” because of “unrealistic civic ideal of a fully informed and engaged citizenry and a neglect of basic pluralist principles about political intermediaries.”
United States: Bruce Cain also wrote a rebuttal to an article by Gary Bass, Danielle Brian, and Norman Eisen, called “Transparency isn’t what keeps government from working,” which recently appeared in a shorter form in the Washington Post. The Cain comment is reproduced by Stanford colleague Francis Fukuyama, who makes his own objections, saying:
The main case against excessive transparency is simple and has three components. First, it undercuts deliberation (have you seen many reasoned open debates in Congress lately?); second, the kinds of disclosure and compliance rules we impose on public officials deters many good people from entering government, and imposes huge burdens on those who do; and finally, it makes very difficult the kind of deal-making that our decentralized system of budgeting requires. With regard to the latter, the problem of earmarks and pork-barrel deals could be mitigated under a parliamentary system with party discipline, but we don’t have such a system and have to work with what we’ve got.
Spain: Commentary (in Spanish) in El Pais on the new access law, written by constitutional law professor Joan Ridao.
United Kingdom: The Campaign for Freedom of Information is celebrating its 30th anniversary by selling t-shirts that lampoon the former prime minister Tony Blair. They can be purchased here for £30 (plus post and packing).
Extractives Transparency: Jim Cust, the head of data and analysis for the Natural Resource Governance Institute, writes about the importance of project-level information about payments.
Book Project: Chapter proposals are being solicited for a forthcoming book entitled “Achieving Open Justice through Citizen Participation and Transparency.” More details.
United States: A court hearing is held on whether a nonprofit group can qualify for a fee waiver available to the media. See by an intervenor, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press.
India: An interview with Subhash Chandra Agrawal, a long-time RTI activist, having filed over 6,000 RTI applications, including about the Padma awards.
United States: The debate over the relationship between FOI and academic institutions is played out in a case in Kansas with political overtones, writes Kaitlin Mulhere in Inside Higher Ed.
Open Data: “Welcome to the Open Data Movement’s Turbulent Teenage Years: No one said transparent government was going to be easy,” an article in NextCity by Andrew Zaleski.
Commentary: The buzz around “social innovation” is examined by Remko Berkhout, who works as a consultant and facilitator with civic organizations on strategy, learning and innovation. He says four biases: a bias towards co-optation instead of genuine collaboration; ‘bigger is always better;’ ‘solving problems’ is more urgent than building the capacity to find solutions; and a serial avoidance of politics.
United States: Secrecy in the Sunshine Era: The Promise and Failure of U.S. Open Government Laws by Jason Ross Arnold (University Press of Kansas, 542 pages, 2014
United States: “A Proposal to Reduce Government Overclassification of Information Related to National Security” by Herbert Lin, Journal of National Security Law & Policy, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2014.
United States: More transparency concerning drone strikes and surveillance is needed, according to an article by Steve Coll in the New York Review of Books entitled “Must Counterterrorism Cancel Democracy?”
United States: A compilation of US FOIA resources done by the Law Librarians’ Society of Washington, D.C. (LLSDC).
United States: The George Washington University “battleground” survey of 1,000 registered voters nationwide indicated there was overwhelming support for state and local governments to initiate standards for accountability and financial transparency, according to David K. Rehr, Adjunct Professor, Graduate School of Political Management, George Washington University, in a Huffington Post article.
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