As stated in the note from the Sunlight Foundation′s Board Chair, as of September 2020 the Sunlight Foundation is no longer active. This site is maintained as a static archive only.

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Tag Archive: international program

The EU lobbyist register needs fixing

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After a summer of debate, the EU working group responsible for reviewing the joint lobbyist register of the European Commission and European Parliament is poised to make recommendations for the future of the register. Strong regulations can shed light on how lobbyists shape the policy making process in the EU. However, the register in its current form is “unsustainable, misguided and simply not credible” -- according to a detailed report by the ALTER - EU, a coalition of about 200 civil society groups, trade unions, academics and public affairs firms concerned with the increasing influence exerted by corporate lobbyists on the political agenda in Europe.

The Sunlight Foundation applauds efforts to create more transparency around lobbying in the EU and encourages everyone to sign the petition launched by the ALTER-EU coalition.

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Where’s the G8 Open Data Charter Action Plan?

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G8 FlickrEarlier this year the United States, along with the other G8 countries, signed on to an Open Data Charter. The document represented a high-level, international commitment to open data and transparency. It committed G8 countries to five important open data principles, including making open data the default. The document required signatories to release action plans for implementing the Charter by the end of October. Thanks to a tip from our friends at the German chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation we've found that, so far, only Britain and Italy have released their full plans (Japan has a draft plan available). There has been no talk, that we can find, about the U.S. action plan.

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India’s FOI Anniversary Spurs Political Finance Transparency

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The eighth anniversary of India’s freedom of information law, the Right to Information Act (RTI), could become an important milestone in the country’s transparency agenda. The 2005 sunshine law has already made a tremendous impact on how Indian decision makers respond to public scrutiny efforts, and this year has seen a heated public debate around the finances of political parties with the anniversary creating momentum to rethink (and maybe even redesign) the country's current political finance transparency landscape.

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Quién Manda: Who’s the Boss? – Spain Edition (Now with less Tony Danza)

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quien-manda_logoLaunched last week by Madrid based nonprofit, Civio, Quién Manda (Who Rules?) takes on the task of monitoring the goings on of Spanish public officials and influential corporate leaders. The platform has been designed to keep an eye on the unmonitored, and rarely recorded interactions that Spanish politicians are having behind closed doors, tinted car windows and somehow frequently right in front of the lens of a camera. The team at Civio has tasked themselves with tagging photos a la Facebook with as many high profile names as they can. Each individual and corporation that gets tagged receives a profile that collects all tagged photos and displays the power connections that have been identified, along with links to social media accounts and any available biographical information. The system currently has over 100 tagged photographs, identifying over 2500 relationships.

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How Open Data Can Engage Civil Society and Improve Procurement Oversight

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With the release of our report on Philippine public procurement we are now two cases into our deep look at procurement transparency and open contracting. As we look at these cases some important themes about data accessibility have begun to emerge. As I said in our Philippines write up: “absent accessible data, whistleblowers and leaks are the only safeguard against corruption. When the data is not readily available, it can’t enable meaningful oversight.” To be truly accessible, simply posting information online is not enough. For transparency to actually lead to accountability, barriers to using the data must be low. Data should be open to the public without gates, published in open and machine-readable formats, and available in bulk. These are things that we have been longtime proponents of at the Sunlight Foundation, (see our Open Data Guidelines), and our case research so far confirms their importance.

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OGP: Opportunities and Limitations

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OGP2It’s been two years since the Open Government Partnership (OGP) was first announced. As Sunlight shares recommendations for the US’s OGP National Action Plan, we’re looking forward to attending and participating in the upcoming summit in London. OGP has demonstrated explosive growth, with the initial 8 founding countries expanding to 60 in a very short time, and more likely to be announced soon. This rapid expansion is an affirmation of government officials’ desire to grapple with transparency issues, and demonstrates an appetite -- particularly from the public --  for “open government” and making it more accessible to the people it serves. OGP has been important in helping governments move in that direction, particularly Brazil’s passing a new FOI law and the US committing to implement the EITI. OGP itself has been quite open in discussing its limitations, and no doubt there will be more of that at the next meeting. But it’s important, in advance of the upcoming summit, to offer a few observations about OGP’s structural limitations to provide context for the new national action plans.

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Transparency Case Study: Public Procurement in the Philippines

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Introduction

For our Philippine case study, we conducted interviews with members of the following groups: staff at transparency NGOs, journalists who have covered procurement, and member organizations representing business interests. Our conversations with these respondents have allowed us to develop a diverse and comprehensive picture of how transparency, information communication technology (ICT) and civil society engagement in public procurement has impacted accountability.

These conversations have provided us with a detailed picture of procurement disclosure and data use in the Philippines since the reforms in 2002. A few findings have become clear:

  • For transparency and public oversight mechanisms to work, public data must be public in more than name only. Publishing information online is not enough, especially if it is trapped in a platform that limits how journalists and watchdogs are able to use the data. PhilGEPS data is not widely used by journalists or CSOs because of artificial and needless barriers to use.
  • Monitoring this volume of proceedings requires the scale and efficiency of data backed analysis. There are thousands of procurement proceedings every year in the Philippines. For example, as of Sept. 20th, 2013, PhilGEPS, the government e-procurement platform, lists 12,346 active opportunities. The civil sector doesn’t have the capacity to monitor procurement at this scale simply by attending the Bid and Awards Committee (BAC) meetings for each one, as the law allows.
  • Without a comprehensive right to information law, access to useful data is largely at the discretion of the procurement entity and varies greatly between procuring entities, depending on the informal trust-based relationships that CSOs have developed with officials.
  • Philippine law splits jurisdiction over procurement monitoring, investigation and sanctioning between various agencies, which can leave misconduct and inefficiency unchecked.

Public procurement in the Philippines presents a salient example of how much the specifics of implementation can matter. If transparency is to enable public oversight, disclosure must meet certain conditions of accessibility and usability. Simply posting information online is not enough. For real transparency, data must be open to the public without gates, it must be published in open and machine-readable formats, and it must be available in bulk.

In mandating the use of ICTs in the procurement process and establishing a formal oversight role for civil society the Government Procurement Reform Act took important steps to reform the Philippine procurement system. These reforms, however, have been considered and implemented largely in isolation, to the detriment of procurement integrity. Civil society oversight through the observer system is a manual and resource-intensive task that doesn’t capitalize on the economies of scale and efficiencies that ICTs can enable. Conversely, the integration of ICTs into public procurement has proceeded largely without including CSOs in the process or considering their needs and uses. Nowhere is this more evident than in the limited feature set of the PhilGEPS system.

Joining the dual accountability mandates of ICT enabled transparency and civil society oversight would make both more effective. Technical platform features should be designed with civil society, media, and oversight use cases in mind. Civil society organizations can serve their mandated roles as observers more effectively – and within their resource constraints – if data about all stages of the procurement process is made available. The Philippines case demonstrates that, absent accessible data, whistleblowers and leaks are the only safeguard against corruption. When the data is not readily available, it can’t enable meaningful oversight.

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Global Open Data Initiative moving forward

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The Global Open Data Initiative is a coalition of civil society organisations working together in the area of open government data and open government.

Our basic goal is that citizens will have full and open access to the government data that is needed in order to build effective government and governance.

The Global Open Data Initiative will serve as a guiding voice internationally on open data issues. Civil society groups who focus on open data have often been isolated to single national contexts, despite the similar challenges and opportunities repeating themselves in countries across the globe. The Global Open Data Initiative aims to help share valuable resources, guidance and judgment, and to clarify the potential for government open data across the world.

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