European Union: The European Central Bank says it will publish the meeting schedules of its six Executive Board members on a monthly basis. The calendars will be released with a three-month time lag starting in February 2016, Bloomberg reports.
Trade Transparency: The Washington Post creates the tool below to allow searches of the recently released test of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with links back to the original.
Canada: Major deficiencies in the access to information practices of two provincial ministries, as well as the Premier’s office, according to a new report by BC’s information and privacy commissioner. “Negligent searches for records, a failure to keep emails, not documenting searches and destroying records after access to information requests — those are the findings from Elizabeth Denham about how things have been handled at the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure,” reported News 1130. See also CBC summary.
Canada: A new book, Access to Information and Social Justice: Critical Research Strategies for Journalists, Scholars and Activists, is introduced in a blog post by the authors, Jamie Brownlee and Kevin Walby are the editors of Access to Information and Social Justice Critical Research Strategies for Journalists, Scholars, and Activists.
India: The Karnataka Information Commission is contemplating holding arbitrations (“adalats”) to help dealing with backlog of cases, says an article in NYOOOZ.
India: Some officials in the Delhi government will be tested on their knowledge of the RTI Act, with awards for performers, The Deccan Herald reports.
United Kingdom: Chris Grayling, the leader of the House of Commons, said it was wrong that the FOI Act as a “research tool” to “generate stories” for the media, report Rowena Mason and Nicholas Watt in The Guardian. But he was later accused of ‘staggering hypocrisy’ when it turned out that he had regularly praised stories uncovered by FOI requests in opposition, using them to embarrass the previous government, according to The Daily Mail.
UK: The new FOIA Commission backtracks on its plan to publish public comments anonymously, Matt reports in FOI Directory. Separately, a survey shows that half of civil servants support charges for FOI requests.
UK: David Higgerson blogs “FOI Friday: Why FOI beats open data and 9 other stories made possible this week thanks to FOI.”
United States: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a transparency implementation plan that establishes guidelines for increasing public disclosure of information by and about U.S. intelligence agencies, according to Secrecy News.
US: The 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act, generally mandates open meetings for federal advisory committees, but over the past ten years, the number of closed meetings has actually increased, a new analysis by the Congressional Research Service finds.
Open Data: “Open Data, Civic Engagement, and Delivery: Did We Go the Wrong Way?,” asks Abhi Nemani, who self-describes as a “technological optimist and political philosophy nerd.” One key point:
This is a long way of saying that the data we need is often not the data we have — at least not what we have on our data portals. Why? I return to the data systems problem scene in the Sunlight era: departments — particularly those in cash strapped agencies — are burdened with legacy systems and overtasked IT professionals, who have to make the difficult decision of keeping the wifi or radio systems working (true story) or writing an ETL script from their years old Oracle database. Add to that the political pressures they come under to meet the demands from elected or appointed pushing hard for this open data, even in the light of such urgent demands, these dedicated public servants are, simply put, between a rock and a hard place. Thus, I lay no blame on the still mostly manual process for open data publication — that’s simply the administrative and political environment we live in.
Open Data: Becky Hogge describes a report she did on the state of open data, work that was commissioned by Omidyar Network earlier this year, “Open Data: Six stories about impact in the UK” – on the Omidyar website. She says the open data community now faces two challenges:
Firstly, and most urgently, it must win over those at HM Treasury who have yet to accept the economic arguments for putting public data in public hands, in time to rescue the nation’s information infrastructure from privatisation…But the open data community must also recognise the need to go further than the bottom line, to stop masking aspirations for a more transparent and accountable society driven by open government data in the language of economics, and to adopt a more rights-based agenda.
US: New results from the ongoing survey by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) that evaluates how well or poorly 21 federal agencies respond to very simple Freedom of Information Act requests.
Research: “Wanted: A Third Generation of Global Governance Research,” an article in Governance by David Coen and Tom Pegram.
Brazil: Fabiano Angelico publishes an analytical study on transparency and legitimacy of organizations of Brazilian civil society (in Portuguese) (Estudo analítico sobre transparência e legitimidade das organizações da sociedade civil brasileira).
Scotland: A top minister indicates a new willingness to possibly include housing associations under the FOI law, according to The Herald.
Research: The Politics of Media Development: The Importance of Engaging Government and Civil Society, a report by Paul Rothman for the US Center for Media Assistance.
Open Data: The Web Foundation issues a report on the quite different open data experiences of South Africa and Kenya.
Open Data: The Sunlight Foundation’s model executive order on open data for city halls is now available in Spanish.
Open Data: Open Data Soft creates a list of 1600+ Open Data portals around the world.
Employment Opportunity: The Natural Resource Governance Institute seeks individual researchers and peer reviewers to support the data gathering process for the 2016 Resource Governance Index.
Open Data Dubai: Vice President and Prime Minister, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, in his capacity as the Ruler of Dubai, issued the Dubai Open Data Law, which allows sharing of non-confidential data between government entities and other stakeholders to complete the legislative framework for turning Dubai into a Smart City, the Emirates News Agency says.
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