Sunlight’s International Fellow presents an up-for-grabs contracts monitoring platform and year-one takeaways. In late 2011, the government in the small country of Slovakia took a bold policy step mandating almost all public contracts and invoices be published online. A reaction to series of scandals this was done in hopes of bringing unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability (read more here). However, the official portal government launched in early 2012 was half-baked, missing full-text search, documents preview or space for comments. While the policy produced more data (“transparency,” if you will), it left accountability untouched.
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