Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not 
responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Alvin Quiñones is the co-founder and director for the Center for Integrity and Public Policy (CIPP). CIPP promotes government transparency and civic engagement in Puerto Rico. He can be reached at alvin@cipp-pr.org
Late last summer, a graduate student friend of mine and I were discussing the need to bring a different dynamic to the discussion of policy and politics in Puerto Rico. Day after day, we would watch the news play out the same type of story lines, with representatives from each political party staking out opposite positions that seemed to be driven more by gang affiliation than actual analysis. The result? An audience distracted from any real discussion of the issues that affected their daily life. So we debated about how could we change this, and out of that summer conversation came a concern for the need to bring a different voice to the public.
As we attempted to gather some government data to be analyzed, we realized that information that should have been of easy access to the public was not readily available. That is how we came upon the idea of gathering the data ourselves and opening a data platform that could be used by journalists, academic institutions, government employees and the general public to further the access to valuable information. Open Puerto Rico was born.
Open Puerto Rico goes beyond being just a source of accurate and objective information: it is also a tool of empowerment. How do we achieve a responsive government if the people don’t know what’s going on? How can they decide which policies to support or how to vote if they have no access to relevant information? It is also an administrative tool for decision makers in government, nonprofits, and the private business in finding the information they need.
At Open PR, we aim to create easier access to government information. Our mission is not to tell people what to think about an issue or a political party, but rather to give them the tools to draw their own conclusions with objective and accurate evidence. We also want to promote a dialogue amongst the people, to be a catalyst for communication and, ultimately, civic engagement.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Catastrophe of District Budgets in the Punjab Province of Pakistan
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of 
the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Zahra Lodhi is the Project Manager - Strengthening Civil Society for Improved Accountability at the Center for Peace and Development Initiatives. Zahra started her career as a Research Associate at Pakistan Agricultural Research Council, Government of Pakistan. She can be reached at zahra.lodi@gmail.com
The key to practical democracy is the active involvement of citizens in every aspect of governance; and budget as an imperative instrument of governance is no exception. However, the budget-making process in Pakistan has been closed and largely opaque and people in general have little opportunity to participate in the process that affects the quality of their lives directly.
In recent decades budget transparency has become a pillar of good governance around the world, but in Pakistan a lot of work still needs to be done. The budget making process in Pakistan is wrapped in curtains of secrecy, as both the government and political parties are taking no major steps to make this process participatory or peoples oriented.
The Centre for Peace and Development Initiatives (CPDI), an Islamabad-based think tank, conducted a study to monitor the process of budget making at the district level. The main aim of this study was to collect research based evidence and find out whether the district governments of Punjab are following the timelines and required procedures for the budget making process. The District Government Budget Rules 2003 lay a clear outline for different timelines and procedures to follow, including a clear requirement for people’s participation in the budget making process.
The survey results revealed very disturbing trends in budget formulation.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: FreedomHack: A Hackathon for Good
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are 
theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Barrett Holmes Pitner is the Senior Global Editor, Cont3nt.com (one of the organizers of the FreedomHack. You can reach him at barrett@cont3nt.com @barrettpitner
This weekend, August 10-11, coders, hackers, policy experts and journalists will spend 24 hours at a hackathon feverishly working together to develop tools and products that will help those living in the most dangerous parts of the world tell their stories. This is FreedomHack.
We have all been to hackathons and witnessed how the combination of energy, enthusiasm, intelligence, creativity and technical expertise consistently results in products that could take months to conceive in a traditional corporate structure. We understand how removing the monotony of “work” from the equation and replacing it with “fun and passion” can create brilliant results, and this is what we aim to achieve this weekend.
When the organizers of FreedomHack conceived the idea, it was just a handful of us in a room trying to figure out the best way to help these communities. A hackathon clearly rose to the top because of its inventive, spontaneous and fun structure.
From the onset, we have always referred to FreedomHack as “a hack for good.” FreedomHack will allow every participant the opportunity to have fun and work hard over one weekend for the benefit of people who live in embattled communities who desperately need your expertise.
This hackathon will focus on developing secure tools and products for those who live in parts of Mexico that have been overrun by cartel violence and human rights related issues. Citizen reporters and journalists regularly face threats on their lives and at the very least, censorship on the vital topics they are reporting.
Register for the FreedomHack hackathon.
Continue readingOpenGov Conversations: Greg Michener on Creating Effective Transparency Policies
Transparency is a slippery concept but important enough that it should be handled with some degree of precision. Unfortunately, the concept is often stretched out of shape and credit-hungry policymakers adopt transparency policies with little regard for preconditions. Here I’m going to take a few positions on preconditions, and my underlying point is that transparency is highly contingent. In order for transparency policies to work we need to take a more cautious approach to conceptualizing ‘transparency’ and to understanding the incentives of supplying and demanding transparency.
Continue readingOpenGov Conversations: Tim Davies on Creating Effective Transparency Policies
Transparency and accountability are so often discussed in the same breath that it’s not uncommon to find them treated as synonyms. The same is increasingly true of openness and transparency. Yet these three terms, openness, transparency and accountability each refer to distinct parts of a process of bringing about change, and there can be gaps, failures and frustrations at each step of the way. Governments engaging with open data often presenting this as equivalent to transparency. Yet as Larsson writes“Openness might… be thought of as a characteristic of the organization, whereas transparency also requires external receptors capable of processing the information made available” (Larsson, 1998). That is to say, openness doesn’t necessarily lead to transparency unless the information made available is both usable, and there are people capable of using it. This makes the transparency relationship one with two parties: the institution being ‘open’, and the receiver able to make sense of the information provided, encouraging us to ask who an institution is becoming transparent too. For example, greater transparency to elites might have very different effects from transparency that also reaches grassroots communities and a broader base of citizens.
Continue readingOpenGov Conversations: Alice Powell on Creating Effective Transparency Policies
Before delving into how transparency policies work, and under which conditions, we need to unpack what these terms mean for the extractive industry. Transparency policies and interventions are designed to bring light to aspects of natural resource management which have been shrouded in secrecy. This can include the basis on which a certain company was chosen for a project or the tax payments a company has made. Making this information available empowers citizens to ask how their revenues were spent or why a contract went to a certain company. This helps prevent deliberate mismanagement (giving a company a contract because your brother-in-law owns it) and also mismanagement due to lack of competence (local authorities not properly collecting taxes). Our goal is ultimately for all citizens to benefit from their natural resources. Without transparency, this isn’t possible. How can you know a community is receiving the correct amount for its natural resources, if you don’t know how much a company has paid in taxes? Transparency works through small and incremental steps, not as a silver bullet. Transparency policies enable and empower actors to ask the right questions and supports them in their campaign for change.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: PySEC, bringing corporate financial data to the masses
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and
do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Luke Rosiak is a former Sunlight Foundation reporter and database analyst who now writes for the Washington Examiner. This post addresses the tooling around Extensible Business Reporting Language and provides recommendations on what needs to be done. You can reach Luke on Twitter at @lukerosiak.
In the early 1990s, long before most federal agencies had embraced the digital era, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) undertook a truly “big data” initiative that showcased some of the best that open data had to offer: Its quarterly reports were uploaded in real time, in text, rather than PDF, format, to a public FTP server called EDGAR. (File Transfer Protocol or FTP is a standard network protocol used to copy a file from one host to another over a network.)
Like with the Federal Election Commission, the companies submitted their own reports, but they immediately entered the public record, and it was the government who required the submissions, dictated the forms and made them available.
EDGAR, which was implemented in part by Sunlight Foundation supporter Carl Malamud, revolutionized a massive industry of financial watchers who used the reports to decide what companies to invest in--and which to dump. Firms like Bloomberg and Reuters processed the text files into structured data, and analysts pored over them.
And before long, the SEC was pushing the ball even further, with talk of XBRL or Extensible Business Reporting Language. After all, financial information was almost entirely numbers-based, lending itself to computer analysis, and was fairly structured, with accountants all using a core of the same carefully-defined terms--though Wall Street accounting is too complex to fit in simple columns and rows, necessitating nested structures and the ability to dynamically define new terms.
The X in XBRL was a double-edged sword there. XBRL’s power, advocates said, was derived from its flexibility. It was a unified language that could express financial ideas whether the company was trading goats in Ethiopia or derivatives in Manhattan. To provide that kind of flexibility, it allowed accountants to define their own terms in financial documents, extending from a base of agreed-upon terms, in America called the US-GAAP.
But the US-GAAP itself had thousands of terms, and accountants who were accustomed to filing paper reports never bothered to learn its structure. Lazy filers created their own custom terms when buried somewhere in the GAAP, there was already a universal term that meant the same thing. That defeated the purpose of structured reporting, because it made comparing across companies impossible.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Open Data in Latin America: Here to stay
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and 
do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Fabrizio Scrollini is currently working on a PhD on transparency and accountability in Latin America at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He co-founded DATAuy which supports Quesabes -- the first website in Uruguay that helps citizens request for public information from their government. DATAuy has also championed open government, open parliament, and transparency in Uruguay by collaborating with other NGOs in the region and organizing hackathons.
Two weeks ago Uruguay, a small Latin American country, had the pleasure of hosting open data and transparency activists from different corners of Latin America and the world for the first Latin American open data unconference. ABRELATAM (named after a plan on the Spanish word “abrelatas,” which means can opener), was organized by DATA Uruguay and Ciudadano Inteligente from Chile in a pioneer partnership to advance transparency and open data in the region. In this post I would like to share with you a snapshot of the awesome discussions that took place at the ABRELATAM.
Community matters.
This is hardly a surprise but community can mean different things. Indeed people are interested in open data for all sorts of reasons, but when it comes to a particular area or group of datasets, and the aim is social change, the need for different skills and common goals becomes crucial. Some of the greatest sessions were about how to link the different worlds of technology, communication, policy and social problem solving. Open data (or the lack of it) is sometimes a great excuse to put minds together working to achieve better outcomes. People working together (not just data) will deliver change, and this is done online, but offline engagement is crucial as well. Communities need to be expanded to involve more people and organizations who can also help to promote open data and use it for their own ends.
OpenGov Voices: Bringing Senate Campaigns into the 21st Century
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy 
of any of the information within the guest blog.
Jon Tester is the junior Senator from Montana. He and his wife, Sharla, still farm the 1,800 acres his grandparents homesteaded in 1912.
With the NSA’s secrets spilling into the news, folks around the country – including U.S. Senators – are demanding more transparency and accountability from the federal government. I fully support these calls for reform.
Transparency matters in the legislative branch, too. My fellow Senators must not neglect their own backyards. My colleagues need to hold themselves accountable to the American people and join me in lifting the veil that hides how Senators and Senate candidates report the money that funds their campaigns.
The Senate’s reporting system is stuck in the Dark Ages, and it’s hurting our democracy.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Open Government is About Raising People’s Opinions
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight 
Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Lucas Dailey is a UX designer and Chief Innovation Officer at political social network MyMaryland.net. You can follow him on Twitter @lucasdailey.
The mechanism for citizen interaction with government doesn’t start and end at the ballot box. An essential goal of our fight for greater government openness and transparency is to give citizens’ opinions greater power. For government to be responsive it must have a fast, easy means to understand how constituents feel about any given issues. Ultimately, government itself is a relationship between the institutions that constitute a polity and its citizens.
MyMaryland.net wants to bridge the gap between voters and their representatives because we believe people’s voices matter. MyMaryland.net connects verified Maryland voters with their elected officials in democracy’s first 24/7 online Town Hall.
Participation: a two-sided problem
One of the keys to a vibrant representative democracy is an informed and engaged citizenry. Yet only 10% of Americans contact their elected officials between elections. We can do better by lowering the hurdles to participate and raising the political value of opinions.
Members of Congress get hundreds or thousands of emails every day. It takes a considerable amount of staff resources to separate constituents from non-constituents, and when they’re finally separated only a very small percentage of messages are from actual voters in their districts.
With MyMaryland.net we prescreen all users through the Maryland voter registration file then connect them with their actual elected officials. Since elected officials know all messages and votes in their MyMaryland.net Town Hall are from their registered voters then they don’t need to spend the time to verify them.
Voters can show their support or opposition to a post simply by voting it up or down instead of writing their own message, thus saving time for citizens and legislative staff. Legislative staff also save time by writing a single response to each post instead of multiple responses to numerous similar messages.
With MyMaryland.net voters and elected officials are able to convey more opinions in less time.
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