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Open data: a revolutionary opportunity for better transparency?

by Stella Dawson | https://twitter.com/stelladawson | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Friday, 22 February 2013 15:56 GMT

* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

By Stella Dawson

 Big data, open government, disruptive technologies, hacktivists, algorithms to scrape the data, geo-mapping. There is plenty of excitement in the anti-corruption world around using data to break down the barriers to the inner workings of governments.  

Its success in holding governments to account will depend very much on the quality of the data released and how readily usable it is – that is, not by the data geeks but by the citizens who want to know what is happening to their money and in their communities. 

On this front, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) gets high marks for its new website, open.undp.org.  Launched in November last year, it is visually clear and quickly shows you where it spends its $5.8 billion budget, a task that previously would have taken hours or days toiling through its budget documents and spreadsheets. 

A map shows you where aid is concentrated. If we would expect Afghanistan to be its biggest single recipient office in 2011, who knew that Argentina would come second?  The amount of aid Afghanistan received compared to other countries is also striking. And of that $885.3 million, only 13 percent went to poverty reduction.  A whopping 75 percent of the money is “crisis prevention and recovery” – this after a decade of NATO forces in the country.

“UNDP have delivered well here,” said Tariq Khokar, open data expert at the World Bank in the blog  Open Data , where he praised the site for its speed, clean interface, access to the raw data and bulk download features.   

It’s a good example of how online data tools can open this huge window, making it far easier to peer into aid organizations, governments and companies to read the blizzard of data that they are starting to release online.  There are agreements for release of data on international development aid, extractive industries and government budgets and industry agreements in the works for construction projects and drugs.

Meanwhile, the World Bank is excited about the potential for citizen monitoring of its projects.  Its online tool Check My School helped a Philippines community monitor and report back whether the school it funded was delivered to specifications.  Kenya,

Indonesia and Moldova, whose governments are part of the global Open Government Data Initiative, are looking into similar programs, it said.     

A measure of the excitement around these initiatives is the sheer range of ideas submitted for using data, smartphones and the Internet to shine a light on what happens to public money. The transparency watchdog Global Integrity is sponsoring a competition to fund projects.  Among the 10 best ideas it has shortlisted so far are: 

-          The Hidden Agenda:  Crowd-sourcing photos to document secret lobbying activities in Spain to show abuse of public resources ahead of Spain’s 2014 presidential campaign.   

-          Wikipedia of Justice: Making a country’s laws and legal rulings accessible to all, especially useful for countries where there is no public record of rulings

-          “Oops! They forgot about us!” to alert Latvians to laws drafted in secret or without input from key parties.

-          Sports Corruption database mapping corruption in sports events globally over the past 10 years to expose the scale of match fixing and its links to gambling markets

Then there is the Knight Foundation, which launched a $5 million challenge this month seeking to fund innovative ideas on how to use the volumes of data released online to hold a mirror up to governments and to become more interactive. 

The test will be whether these end up as isolated projects loved more by the data geeks who design them in developed countries and too little used by poor citizens who suffer most from bribery and corruption.  Many of the online reporting sites for retail bribery, which blossomed last year, suffered this fate of not being used as an advocacy weapon. 

At the very least, well designed sites make digging for vital information far easier for those who have access to the Internet. If used effectively, for governments, aid agencies and companies, publishing the data on the Internet could prove as disruptive as the Gutenberg printing press. 

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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