Using open government for climate action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Elizabeth Moses at Eco-Business: “Countries made many national climate commitments as part of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which entered into force earlier this month. Now comes the hard part of implementing those commitments. The public can serve an invaluable watchdog role, holding governments accountable for following through on their targets and making sure climate action happens in a way that’s fair and inclusive.

But first, the climate and open government communities will need to join forces….

Here are four areas where these communities can lean in together to ensure governments follow through on effective climate action:

1) Expand access to climate data and information.

Open government and climate NGOs and local communities can expand the use of traditional transparency tools and processes such as Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, transparent budgeting, open data policies and public procurement to enhance open information on climate mitigation, adaptation and finance.

For example, Transparencia Mexicana used Mexico’s Freedom of Information Law to collect data to map climate finance actors and the flow of finance in the country. This allows them to make specific recommendations on how to safeguard climate funds against corruption and ensure the money translates into real action on the ground….

2) Promote inclusive and participatory climate policy development.

Civil society and community groups already play a crucial role in advocating for climate action and improving climate governance at the national and local levels, especially when it comes to safeguarding poor and vulnerable people, who often lack political voice….

3) Take legal action for stronger accountability.

Accountability at a national level can only be achieved if grievance mechanisms are in place to address a lack of transparency or public participation, or address the impact of projects and policies on individuals and communities.

Civil society groups and individuals can use legal actions like climate litigation, petitions, administrative policy challenges and court cases at the national, regional or international levels to hold governments and businesses accountable for failing to effectively act on climate change….

4) Create new spaces for advocacy.

Bringing the climate and open government movements together allows civil society to tap new forums for securing momentum around climate policy implementation. For example, many civil society NGOs are highlighting the important connections between a strong Governance Goal 16 under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and strong water quality and climate change policies….(More)”

The “Open Government Reform” Movement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Suzanne J. Piotrowski on “The Case of the Open Government Partnership and U.S. Transparency Policies”: “Open government initiatives, which include not only transparency but also participation and collaboration policies, have become a major administrative reform. As such, these initiatives are gaining cohesiveness in literature. President Obama supported open government through a range of policies including the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a multinational initiative. The OGP requires member organizations to develop open government national action plans, which are used as the basis for my analysis. To frame this paper, I use and expand upon David Heald’s directions and varieties of transparency framework. A content analysis of the 62 commitments in the US Second Open Government National Action Plan was conducted. The analysis provides two findings of note: First, the traditional view of transparency was indeed the most prevalent in the policies proposed. In that respect, not much has changed, even with the OGP’s emphasis on a range moof approaches. Second, openness among and between agencies played a larger than expected role. While the OGP pushed an array of administrative reforms, the initiative had limited impact on the type of policies that were proposed and enacted. In sum, the OGP is an administrative reform that was launched with great fanfare, but limited influence in the US context. More research needs to be conducted to determine is the “open government reform” movement as a whole suffers from such problems in implementation….(More)”

Is Open Data the Death of FOIA?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Beth Noveck at the Yale Law Journal: “For fifty years, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has been the platinum standard for open government in the United States. The statute is considered the legal bedrock of the public’s right to know about the workings of our government. More than one hundred countries and all fifty states have enacted their own freedom of information laws. At the same time, FOIA’s many limitations have also become evident: a cumbersome process, delays in responses, and redactions that frustrate journalists and other information seekers. Politically-motivated nuisance requests bedevil government agencies.With over 700,000 FOIA requests filed every year, the federal government faces the costs of a mounting backlog.

In recent years, however, an entirely different approach to government transparency in line with the era of big data has emerged: open government data. Open government data —generally shortened to open data—has many definitions but is generally considered to be publicly available information that can be universally and readily accessed, used, and redistributed free of charge in digital form. Open data is not limited to statistics, but also includes text such as the United States Federal Register, the daily newspaper of government, which was released as open data in bulk form in 2010.

To understand how significant the open data movement is for FOIA, this Essay discusses the impact of open data on the institutions and functions of government and the ways open data contrasts markedly with FOIA. Open data emphasizes the proactive publication of whole classes of information. Open data includes data about the workings of government but also data collected by the government about the economy and society posted online in a centralized repository for use by the wider public, including academic users seeking information as the basis for original research and commercial users looking to create new products and services. For example, Pixar used open data from the United States Geological Survey to create more realistic detail in scenes from its movie The Good Dinosaur.

By contrast, FOIA promotes ex post publication of information created by the government especially about its own workings in response to specific demands by individual requestors. I argue that open data’s more systematic and collaborative approach represents a radical and welcome departure from FOIA because open data concentrates on information as a means to solve problems to the end of improving government effectiveness. Open data is legitimated by the improved outcomes it yields and grounded in a theory of government effectiveness and, as a result, eschews the adversarial and ad hoc FOIA approach. Ultimately, however, each tactic offers important complementary benefits. The proactive information disclosure regime of open data is strengthened by FOIA’s rights of legal enforcement. Together, they stand to become the hallmark of government transparency in the fifty years ahead….(More)”.

From Tech-Driven to Human-Centred: Opengov has a Bright Future Ahead

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Martin Tisné: ” The anti-corruption and transparency field ten years ago was in pre-iPhone mode. Few if any of us spoke of the impact or relevance of technology to what would become known as the open government movement. When the wave of smart phone and other technology hit from the late 2000s onwards, it hit hard, and scaled fast. The ability of technology to create ‘impact at scale’ became the obvious truism of our sector, so much so that pointing out the failures of techno-utopianism became a favorite pastime for pundits and academics. The technological developments of the next ten years will be more human-centered — less ‘build it and they will come’ — and more aware of the un-intended consequences of technology (e.g. the fairness of Artifical Intelligence decision making) whilst still being deeply steeped in the technology itself.

By 2010, two major open data initiatives had launched and were already seen as successful in the US and UK, one of President Obama’s first memorandums was on openness and transparency, and an international research project had tracked 63 different instances of uses of technology for transparency around the world (from Reclamos in Chile, to I Paid a Bribe in India, via Maji Matone in Tanzania). Open data projects numbered over 200 world-wide within barely a year of data.gov.uk launching and to everyone’s surprise topped the list of Open Government Partnership commitments a few years hence.

The technology genie won’t go back into the bottle: the field will continue to grow alongside technological developments. But it would take a bold or foolish pundit to guess which of blockchain or other developments will have radically changed the field by 2025.

What is clearer is that the sector is more questioning towards technology, more human-centered both in the design of those technologies and in seeking to understand and pre-empt their impact….

We’ve moved from cyber-utopianism less than ten years ago to born-digital organisations taking a much more critical look at the deployment of technology. The evangelical phase of the open data movement is coming to an end. The movement no longer needs to preach the virtues of unfettered openness to get a foot in the door. It seeks to frame the debate as to whether, when and how data might legitimately be shared or closed, and what impacts those releases may have on privacy, surveillance, discrimination. An open government movement that is more human-centered and aware of the un-intended consequences of technology, has a bright and impactful future ahead….(More)”

Results Through Transparency: Does Publicity Lead to Better Procurement?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Charles Kenny and Ben Crisman: “Governments buy about $9 trillion worth of goods and services a year, and their procurement policies are increasingly subject to international standards and institutional regulation including the WTO Plurilateral Agreement on Government Procurement, Open Government Partnership commitments and International Financial Institution procurement rules. These standards focus on transparency and open competition as key tools to improve outcomes. While there is some evidence on the impact of competition on prices in government procurement, there is less on the impact of specific procurement rules including transparency on competition or procurement outcomes. Using a database of World Bank financed contracts, we explore the impact of a relatively minor procurement rule governing advertising on competition using regression discontinuity design and matching methods….(More)”

Open parliament policy applied to the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Cristiano Faria & Malena Rehbein  in The Journal of Legislative Studies:”…analyse the implementation of an open parliament policy that is taking place at the Chamber of Deputies, in accordance with the guidelines of the Open Government Partnership international programme (OGP), regarding the action plan of the Opening Parliament Work Group in particular, one of the subgroups of OGP. The authors will evaluate two blocks of initiatives for open parliaments executed by the Chamber in the last few years, that is, digital participation in the legislative process and Transparency 2.0, in order to observe their impasses and results obtained until now. In the first part the authors will study the e-Democracy portal and in the second part the authors will focus on open data, collaborative activities to use those data (hackathons) and the creation of the Hacker Lab, a permanent space dedicated to open parliament practices. The analysis considers the initiatives that the authors evaluated as part of the transformative and arena profiles of the Brazilian Parliament, according to Polsby’s classification, with exclusive characteristics…. (More)”

See also Hacking Parliament

The openness buzz in the knowledge economy: Towards taxonomy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Anne Lundgren in “Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy”: “In the networked information and knowledge-based economy and society, the notions of ‘open’ and ‘openness’ are used in a variety of contexts; open source, open access, open economy, open government, open innovation – just to name a few. This paper aims at discussing openness and developing a taxonomy that may be used to analyse the concept of openness. Are there different qualities of openness? How are these qualities interrelated? What analytical tools may be used to understand openness? In this paper four qualities of openness recurrent in literature and debate are explored: accessibility, transparency, participation and sharing. To further analyse openness new institutional theory as interpreted by Williamson (2000) is used, encompassing four different institutional levels; cultural embeddedness, institutional environment, governance structure and resource allocations. At what institutional levels is openness supported and/or constrained? Accessibility as a quality of openness seems to have a particularly strong relation to the other qualities of openness, whereas the notions of sharing and collaborative economics seem to be the most complex and contested quality of openness in the knowledge-based economy. This research contributes to academia, policy and governance, as handling of challenges with regard to openness vs. closure in different contexts, territorial, institutional and/or organizational, demand not only a better understanding of the concept, but also tools for analysis….(More)”

Designing the Next Generation of Open Data Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst at the Open Data Charter Blog: “The international Open Data Charter has emerged from the global open data community as a galvanizing document to place open government data directly in the hands of citizens and organizations. To drive this process forward, and ensure that the outcomes are both systemic and transformational, new open data policy needs to be based on evidence of how and when open data works in practice. To support this work, the GovLab, in collaboration with Omidyar Network, has recently completed research which provides vital evidence of open data projects around the world, including an analysis of 19 in-depth, impact-focused case studies and a key findings paper. All of the research is now available in an eBook published by O’Reilly Media.

The research found that open data is making an impact in four core ways, including:…(More)”

How Technology is Crowd-Sourcing the Fight Against Hunger

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Beth Noveck at Media Planet: “There is more than enough food produced to feed everyone alive today. Yet access to nutritious food is a challenge everywhere and depends on getting every citizen involved, not just large organizations. Technology is helping to democratize and distribute the job of tackling the problem of hunger in America and around the world.

Real-time research

One of the hardest problems is the difficulty of gaining real-time insight into food prices and shortages. Enter technology. We no longer have to rely on professional inspectors slowly collecting information face-to-face. The UN World Food Programme, which provides food assistance to 80 million people each year, together with Nielsen is conducting mobile phone surveys in 15 countries (with plans to expand to 30), asking people by voice and text about what they are eating. Formerly blank maps are now filled in with information provided quickly and directly by the most affected people, making it easy to prioritize the allocation of resources.

Technology helps the information flow in both directions, enabling those in need to reach out, but also to become more effective at helping themselves. The Indian Ministry of Agriculture, in collaboration with Reuters Market Light, provides information services in nine Indian languages to 1.4 million registered farmers in 50,000 villages across 17 Indian states via text and voice messages.

“In the United States, 40 percent of the food produced here is wasted, and yet 1 in 4 American children (and 1 in 6 adults) remain food insecure…”

Data to the people

New open data laws and policies that encourage more transparent publication of public information complement data collection and dissemination technologies such as phones and tablets. About 70 countries and hundreds of regions and cities have adopted open data policies, which guarantee that the information these public institutions collect be available for free use by the public. As a result, there are millions of open datasets now online on websites such as the Humanitarian Data Exchange, which hosts 4,000 datasets such as country-by-country stats on food prices and undernourishment around the world.

Companies are compiling and sharing data to combat food insecurity, too. Anyone can dig into the data on the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition platform, a data collaborative where 300 private and public partners are sharing information.

Importantly, this vast quantity of open data is available to anyone, not only to governments. As a result, large and small entrepreneurs are able to create new apps and programs to combat food insecurity, such as Plantwise, which uses government data to offer a knowledge bank and run “plant clinics” that help farmers lose less of what they grow to pests. Google uses open government data to show people the location of farmers markets near their homes.

Students, too, can learn to play a role. For the second summer in a row, the Governance Lab at New York University, in partnership with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), mounted a two-week open data summer camp for 40 middle and high school students. The next generation of problem solvers is learning new data science skills by working on food safety and other projects using USDA open data.

Enhancing connection

Ultimately, technology enables greater communication and collaboration among the public, social service organizations, restaurants, farmers and other food producers who must work together to avoid food crises. The European Food Safety Authority in Italy has begun exploring how to use internet-based collaboration (often called citizen science or crowdsourcing) to get more people involved in food and feed risk assessment.

In the United States, 40 percent of the food produced here is wasted, and yet 1 in 4 American children (and 1 in 6 adults) remain food insecure, according to the Rockefeller Foundation. Copia, a San Francisco based smartphone app facilitates donations and deliveries of those with excess food in six cities in the Bay Area. Zero Percent in Chicago similarly attacks the distribution problem by connecting restaurants to charities to donate their excess food. Full Harvest is a tech platform that facilitates the selling of surplus produce that otherwise would not have a market.

Mobilizing the world

Prize-backed challenges create the incentives for more people to collaborate online and get involved in the fight against hunger….(More)”

Open Government Implementation Model

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Government Implementation ModelKDZ: “The City of Vienna was the first public agency in a German speaking country to develop an Open Government Initative and to commit itself to the concept of Open Data – an open and transparent system that makes city data available to citizens for their further use. Vienna’s first Open Data catalogue has been presented to the public.

The KDZ – Centre for Public Administration Research was contracted by the Chief Executive Office of Vienna to contribute to the Open Government strategy of the City of Vienna. In order to bring the insights and propositions gained to the attention of a wider public, the Open Government Implementation Model  has been translated into English.

The KDZ Implementation Model is based on and significantly elaborates the “Open Government Implementation Model” by Lee/Kwak (2011). …(More)

See also: