Governance Data: A new group called Governance Data Alliance has been announced. (Also see blog post about it by Nathaniel Heller.) There is a 21-age vision statement. The introduction says:
The current state of affairs is vastly insufficient when it comes to the production and usage of high-quality governance data. Producers rarely know who uses their data; users have no way of signaling to producers what they want and need; and donors have no idea what the return on their investments is. We’re trying to change that, together, and to establish a more efficient market for the production and use of governance data globally.
With a draft $1.5 million budget and the involvement of many organizations, the new group outlines five project proposals:
- Design and implement a peer-to-peer training program between governance data producers to improve the quality and salience of existing data.
- Develop a lightweight data standard to be adopted by producer organizations to make it easier for users to consume governance data.
- Mine the 2014 Reform Efforts Survey to understand who actually uses which governance data, currently, around the world.
- Leverage the 2014 Reform Efforts Survey “plumbing” to field customized follow-up surveys to better assess what data users seek in future governance data.
- Pilot (on a regional basis) coordinated data production amongst producer organizations to fill coverage gaps, reduce redundancies, and respond to actual usage and user preferences.
Mexico: The National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INA) (formerly IFAI) has released the agreement (in Spanish) that establishes the interpretation and implementation rules and conditions of the General Law of Transparency and Access to Public Information has been issued. The rules and conditions are mandatory for all governmental organizations and for autonomous entities, unions, political parties, public funds and any public or private person that receives public resources are obliged under the Agreement as well.
United States: Groups in the United States issue a model National Action Plan. The US FOIA Ombudsman’s office seeks suggestions on what FOIA reform commitments should be in the action plan.
Right to Be Forgotten: France is putting pressure on Google to apply the European Union Right to Be Forgotten ruling globally “to all domains” by issuing an ultimatum. The regulator’s statement is here. Google in January said RTBF only applies to content shown in Europe and not the entire Google.com index. In Russia, the Russian Duma on June 16 strongly supported a draft RTBF law requiring Internet search engines to delete links to content based on users’ requests.
Slovakia: “Once Riddled with Corruption, Slovakia Sets a New Standard for Transparency,” writes Gabriel Sipos. Cited is a new study by Transparency International (TI) Slovakia showing that “as much as one-tenth of the population has checked at least one contract or receipt online” through the central database of contracts, the number of media stories on procurement rose over 25 percent more stories about government procurement than before and that the share of tenders with single bidders dropped from over half to less than one-third.
Malaysia: An article in The Star says: “Often times, citizens are not able to obtain information because the access to this information is blocked by the government, be it the Federal or state governments. And most of the time, the information is classified under the Official Secrets Act, so the public will have no access to it.”
Russia: A group of lawyers are challenging a presidential decree on the classification of information about the losses of Russian troops in peacetime in the Supreme Court. Lawyers believe that the lawsuit “stands a good chance,” according to a report on the effort.
Potential Funding: The international consortium Making All Voices Count says that on June 30 it will release a call for research proposals on priority themes and questions in six focus countries: Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Indonesia, the Philippines and Tanzania. In May 2015, it published a Research & Evidence Strategy.
Open Data: GovLab announces the launch of a new project – Open Data Impact Studies – a series of international case studies sponsored by Omidyar Network and to be developed this summer. “These impact studies are designed to help us better understand the demand-use-impact cycle of open data.” The lead researcher is Becky Hogge, who wrote about the issue of measuring the impact of open data in an April blog post.
World Bank: “The World Bank wants all corporate bidders on bank-funded projects to publicly reveal their true owners as a way of tackling fraud and cronyism in government contracts, a senior official said,” according to a Thomson Reuters Foundation report on an interview with Chris Browne, chief procurement officer at the Bank.
Change-Making: The “Marketplace of Ideas for Policy Change” report by AidData “examines the influence of over 100 external assessments of government performance — from cross-country benchmarking exercises and watchlists to country-specific diagnostics and conditional aid programs — on the policymaking process of low and middle income countries.” It identifies five “trends:”
- External assessments can influence reform efforts, but some are far more influential than others.
- External assessment influence is strongest at the agenda-setting stage of the policymaking process.
- In a crowded marketplace of policy ideas, assessment familiarity delivers an influence dividend.
- Influencing reform efforts from the outside is easier in some policy domains than in others.
- Geography matters: assessments achieve widely varying levels of uptake across regions and countries.
India: Indian missions abroad “have been shying away from revealing budgetary allocations and expenditure over the years,” according to an Economic Times article on a report (apparently not yet posted) by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.
India: A critical commentary on the state of RTI in the Indian state of Odisha by OdishaDiary says, “In Odisha almost 3000 cases are pending but for the last two years, the post of State Information Commissioner is vacant.”
United Kingdom/E-Mail: FOIMan blogger Paul Gibbons “wonders if 90 day retention of email by the Cabinet Office is a conspiracy, or if it could be a (clumsy) attempt at governance.”
India: “Five months after the Narendra Modi government sacked the then foreign secretary Sujatha Singh, it has refused to divulge under the Right to Information Act the Cabinet note or any other details related to the controversial decision The Cabinet Secretariat has not divulged the Cabinet note, file notings and papers related to the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) meeting on January 28, which had decided to replace Singh with S Jaishankar,” reports The Economic Times.
Canada: “People are waiting longer, paying more and getting less information when they file requests under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act in Nova Scotia, according to a report by the review officer,” says an article by The Canadian Press.
Canada: Paige MacPherson, Alberta director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, lists proposals to make Alberta’s government more transparent, including FOI reform.
United States: See a report in Federal Computer Week about talks on government data by populist Ralph Nader and the anti-tax conservative Grover Norquist.
United States: A White Paper on access to divorce proceedings by the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press.
OGP: A summary is issued of a report on the influence of the work of the independent reviewers of OGP National Action Plans under the Independent Review Mechanism. Consultant Suchi Pande found that eight government points of contact “found the IRM process helpful.” The IRM’s overall influence, however, can be described as “diffuse.”
Civic Space: Mandeep Tiwana, a lawyer specializing in human rights and civil society issues and Head of Policy and Research at CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance, writes that “in recent years there has been a perceptible rise in restrictions on civil space.” He suggests four key drivers: a global democratic deficit, a worldwide obsession with state security and countering of ‘terrorism’ by all actors except the state, rampant collusion by a handful of interconnected political and economic elites, and the disturbance caused by religious fundamentalist and evangelist groups seeking to upend the collective progress made by civil society in advancing the human rights discourse.
United States: “Clinton’s Secrecy Damages the Foundation of Our Democracy,” according to a Huffington Post article by Erich Pica, President, Friends of the Earth and FOE Action.
Open Data: “Cities and other government jurisdictions should develop detailed criteria and standards to help them efficiently develop their open data initiatives,” according to a report released by Open Data LA, a project of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy.
Filed under: What's New