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.
With Sunlight`s growing involvement in the global open government movement, we are introducing some of the innovative and interesting open government tools and projects outside of the U.S. We welcome our first international guest blogger, Eva Vozárová, who works as an IT projects manager at the Slovak watchdog NGO Fair-play Alliance. She worked as a journalist for five years at the largest Slovak economic weekly, Trend, before joining FPA. Currently, she mostly works on open data-related activities. Eva will join us at TransparencyCamp next week, and it’s not too late to register for TCamp!
Slightly over a year ago, an important shift happened in the field of access to information in Slovakia. The government of the Prime Minister Iveta Radičová was due to leave office in a couple of weeks. The involved parties lost elections in March 2012 and were soon to be replaced by their opponents.
But in a final move before going out of business, the Cabinet Office decided to make a push for openness in Slovakia and launched an official governmental data portal at data.gov.sk. The whole process took about a month and was greatly helped by OKFN and their CKAN platform, which was used to power the portal. For the first time, Slovak government made a commitment to publish data proactively, systematically and in machine readable formats.
True, the data was not of very good quality at the beginning. Even now, a year later, it is still lacking in several aspects. The formats are often inconsistent, often linking to plain .html websites. The licensing is not sorted out at all with public licenses not being available under Slovak copyright law. And some of the most interesting datasets are still stuck in the process of being published. But anyway -- the shift happened and the data is slowly being released.
It was to a great extent thanks to the work of Slovak Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) that this shift happened at all. The Fair-play Alliance started working with data 10 years ago. In 2003 we first started requesting public data through FOIA requests, collecting it and analyzing it. Since then, we created an extensive database of public information called Datanest.sk -- a website storing loads of information about flows of public money in Slovakia (subsidies, EU funds, funding of political parties). In short, a website filled with as much corruption-related data as you can possibly get in Slovakia. The data is accessible and searchable through the web and is also available through a simple API. It’s far from perfect and it has been a long time in the making, but it was available long before the state started publishing its own data and even today, Datanest is still the only source to have published several interesting datasets.
The reason why we originally decided to go for data was pretty simple. As a watchdog organization made up of several former journalists, we wanted to focus on anti-corruption advocacy through publishing of corruption-related cases. In order to prepare these stories properly, we needed to look at hard evidence - and getting the data about public finances was simply the best way to go about it.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Creating an Early Warning System for Political Activism
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.
Adam Green is the CTO of UniteBlue.com -- a social network for progressives based on Twitter. UniteBlue connects and organizes political activists on a national and state level. You can reach. Adam at adam@uniteblue.com.
One of the great challenges for political activism in each of the 50 state legislatures is providing timely information on bills as they move through the legislative process. The data provided by the Sunlight Foundation Open States API is comprehensive, but combing through it to find the limited number of bills that activists have the time to focus on can be overwhelming. I have found over 88,000 bills in the current session alone. We are now developing an early warning system at UniteBlue.com that can assist our volunteers in filtering this information flow down to a manageable level.
While the entire process will take months to complete, in this guest post I’d like to propose a triage model that can be used as a first step. Triage is the medical model used in hospital emergency rooms and during disaster responses. A high flow of patients is screened using certain “signatures” to determine which ones need to be seen first, such as blocked airways or dangerous vital signs. The process of triaging the high flow of bills coming from the Sunlight data will follow a similar model.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Bring That Lantern Over Here: Why Budget Transparency Matters
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.
Rodney Bent is a U.S. Advisory Committee Member of Publish What You Fund -- a global campaign for aid transparency. He spent most of his career with the US government, including more than 20 years with the Office of Management Budget, as well as time at the State Department and the Millennium Challenge Corporation.
Over the past 18 years, the American public told pollsters they believe the U.S. government spends way too much on foreign aid, reckoning that something like a fifth or a quarter of the federal budget is used for that purpose.
That, of course, is not true. It’s really “just” one percent of the budget, or more than $50 billion. That’s still a lot of money. Senator Everett Dirksen might never have said “a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” but here we are talking real money. What does the U.S. taxpayer get for that $50 billion?
It’s hard to know. It should not be.
On January 21, 2009, President Obama said his Administration was committed “to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.” I’d wager that he has done just that – the frontier of knowledge and the boundaries of available data have been pushed out. It is unprecedented, and for that, two cheers.
The Administration needs to do more to earn that third cheer. Unprecedented doesn’t mean good enough.
Sy Syms, the legendary discounter, had it right: “An educated consumer is our best customer.” Transparency in all government spending is essential but transparency in foreign assistance spending is critical. Foreign aid spending is never popular in Congress. American taxpayers, with respect to foreign aid, are neither educated consumers nor good customers. The executive branch should help in the education by being much more transparent in what it does with foreign assistance.
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