UNESCO: “2016 World Press Freedom Day celebrations highlight link between freedom of information and sustainable development,” according to a press release about the ceremonies and programs to be held in Finland May 2-4. Several FOI related panels are to be held, according to the program. “All the main sessions” will be streamed, a UNESCO official said. This probably will include a session on “Freedom of Information as a Fundamental Freedom and Human Right,” but not other FOI-related “parallel sessions.” Also see text of remarks by Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO.
Commentary: “Over-politeness is the fatal flaw in the open data movement,” Tom Steinberg, the founder of My Society, writes in the Civicist. “Meaningful transparency is only ever beaten out of governments with a stick made of pure power politics,” he says. He concludes:
As long as significant numbers of transparency advocates are engaged constructively on the business of getting open data releases out, the pace of significant transparency reforms will be slowed. Overly-friendly collaboration between governments and transparency advocates sucks the oxygen out of the room. And we need that oxygen to fuel the fires that can burn down the doors to the state, and to parasitic organizations like anonymous shell companies that are dependent upon inaction by the state.
A reply by John Wonderlich of the US Sunlight Foundation defends collaboration. It says in part:
Open data advocacy isn’t perfect, and there’s clearly no shortage of work to be done. From expanding audiences, to building inclusion, to balancing the competing interests fighting both for and against disclosure, what “open data” should be, remains a work in progress. But it isn’t being destroyed by collaboration.
Steinberg responded, acknowledging the value of collaboration, but concluding:
My claim is simply that the resources expended on the ‘nice’ side of the balance have been too great, and those spent on the ‘tough’ side have been too modest. I wonder if you actually disagree with that, at all.
Wonderlich reacted:
There should certainly be more adversarial advocacy. (A recent absolute favorite: police union contracts designed to evade accountability, as gathered through FOI requests: http://www.checkthepolice.org/database/ )
The nature of the false choice I’m describing, though, is that the biggest risk to one’s credibility is protect it by overanalyzing about your political capital as an advocate, and failing to take risks as a result.
Africa: The Media Institute of South Africa publishes special materials to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of Windhoek Declaration. It contains 40 articles and video content on free media, free expression and access to information in sub-Saharan Africa. Pansy Tlakula the Chairperson of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) and its Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information writes:
Without information, people cannot access government services or exercise their right to vote. Without information, the cultures of secrecy embedded in many governments across the globe remain in place.
Transparency Research: A new report commissioned by the World Bank, “Open Government Impact and Outcomes: Mapping the Landscape of Ongoing Research”, categorizes and takes stock of existing research. The report represents the first output of anewly-formed consortium that aims to generate practical, evidence-based guidance for open government stakeholders, building on and complementing the work of organizations across the academic-practitioner spectrum.
Transparency Research: A new “hub for quantitative and qualitative research on innovations in governance,” the Open Governance Research Exchange (OGRX) “seeks to solve this problem by curating and making accessible a diversity of findings on innovating governance.” It was developed by the GovLab in collaboration with the World Bank Digital Engagement Evaluation Team and mySociety. Freedom of information and open data are among the categories. Five entries under FOI so far.
United States: The differences between the House and Senate FOIA reform bills are analyzed and charted by Wendy Ginsburg of the Library of Congress Congressional Research Service. A Government Executive article by Charles S. Clark on efforts to resolve the differences between the two bills in headlined, “FOIA Reform Appears Close, But Not a Done Deal.”
Venezuela: “Access to public information, accountability and government transparency are three concepts that over time have become increasingly bizarre for Venezuelans, despite the global trend is in that direction,” writes Alejandra Herjandez in El Universal. The article quotes the director of the NGO Transparency Venezuela, Mercedes De Freitas, as saying that opacity of information has become a “systematic policy of state.”
Venezuela: The Press and Society Institute (IPYS for its acronym in Spanish) Venezuela, with Transparencia Venezuela, is launching Vendata, an online platform used to easily display information contained in the “Gacetas Oficiales,” official government bulletins, The Knight Center summarizes.
Italy: A new infographic from Diritto Di Sapere displays what should be changed in the draft FOI law.
Environmental Transparency/Peru: The standard transparency portals (STP) of technical agencies, linked to climate change, do not provide all the information required by Peru´s law on transparency and access to information, according to the study of Derecho, Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (DAR), which says these institutions achieved an average compliance of 73% in the quarterly update of their STP.
Malaysia: Working around the lack of official mapping information to fight deforestation as described by Nithin Coca for Sustainable Brands.
India: The state government of Keral has rejected a suggestion of the State Information Commission to consider Indian Postal Order for remitting the fee for seeking information under the Right to Information Act, The Deccan Chronicle reports.
Georgia: A new study published by IDFI about the engagement of local governments in OGP.
Anti-corruption: Charles Kenny, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, Washington, D.C., seeks comments on a draft of a book “Results Not Receipts: Counting the Right Things in Aid and Corruption” [working title]. “The elevator pitch: donors frequently suggest corruption is the biggest obstacle to development and aid effectiveness, and that they can accurately measure corruption risk while protecting their projects from it at a reasonable cost. It isn’t and they can’t.” Chapters Five and Six “discuss the weak empirical basis for current donor approaches to anti-corruption and call for a focus on transparency and outcomes.”
Open Contracting: “I have worked on public procurement and governance for most of my life. But I have never been more excited to finally have a solution at hand that has potential to change the legacy of opaqueness, fraud and lack of effectiveness in public contracting in many African countries.” So writes Robert Hunja of the Open Contracting Partnership.
United Kingdom: The Sun reports that top officials “are sending group texts using the WhatsApp service to keep details of how they are running the EU Remain campaign secret for all time.”
Fiji: Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum says the Government is working ona FOIA bill to be tabled in the next session of Parliament.
United States: “Declassification of national security information should be pursued on a par with classification, according to a Department of Defense directive that was reissued yesterday,” reports Steve Aftergood in Secrecy News, commenting, “This seems commendable as an aspirational goal, but it is hard to consider it an accurate description of existing DoD policy.
United States: Many FOIA topics among the recommendations by The Sunlight Foundation for the next Justice Department open government plan.
United States/Book Review: A review by Monica Horten of the book “The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945-1975” by Michael Schudson calls it “an essential read for anyone researching politics and open government.” Also noted is a podcast of Schudson’s lecture at LSE, ‘Expectations of Openness in an Age of Secrecy: Where the ”Right to Know” Comes From’, recorded on 13 January 2016.
United States: Sina Odugbemi of the World Bank has summarized a debate held March 15, 2016 at the University of Missouri on the topic of Is American Government too open? Professor Bruce E. Cain of Stanford University argued that “Yes, American Government Is Too Open”, and Professor Charles Lewis of American University, Washington DC, argued that “No, American Government is Not Too Open”. Watch the debate here.
United States: “How a simple request got me blacklisted by the Pentagon,” writes Nick Turs in The Intercept.
Transparency Research: “Does Access to Information Empower the Poor? Evidence from the Dominican Republic,” by Emmanuel Skoufias, World Bank; Inter-American Development Bank (IADB); Renata Narita, University of Sao Paulo (USP); Ambar Narayan, World Bank, Poverty Global Practice. May 1, 2014, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 6895.
Abstract: This paper summarizes the results of the impact evaluation of the Access to Information pilot project on empowerment of citizens in poor municipalities in the Dominican Republic. Among the dimensions of empowerment investigated are civic knowledge, awareness and use of the right to information, perceptions of and trust in public services and institutions, civic participation, and measures of local governance. Data were collected in two rounds: a baseline round at the end of 2010 and a follow-up round in mid-2012. No impact is found on awareness and the use of information under the specific Access to Information rules. However, it is observed that individuals address more general complaints to governments as a result of the Access to Information program regardless of whether these are classified under the ATI law or not. Some positive and statistically significant impacts are found on local government responsiveness, prioritization and decisions about the municipal budget, and trust in and satisfaction with some local government services.
Google Transparency: Campaign for Accountability launches the Google Transparency Project (GTP), an online resource that allows the public to explore the company’s influence on government, public policies, and our lives.
Fashion Transparency: The London-based group called Fashion Revolution and Ethical Consumer, a nonprofit magazine and Web site, creates a Fashion Transparency Index that ranked more than 40 global retail companies based on their level of transparency and support of workers’ rights.
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