At Private Sector Development Blog, I recently found a nice post highlighting some of the current trends in open data availability in the development and public sectors. Notably, it discusses how the British government, under a new campaign called “Show us a better way,” is releasing large amounts of data into the public realm as well as reviewing approaches to improving the visualization of data to the public.
Additionally, as words like “transparency” and “corruption” are incessant buzzwords in development talk, it’s nice to see public pressure from watchdog groups like Publish What You Fund, AidInfo, and others coupled with innovations from web 2.0 developers and statisticians (like this new Google search feature) (or wiki group source humanitarian data) pushing the discussion into some action. However small, these actors can serve as gadflies to induce INGOs, government agencies, developmen banks, etc to show their work.
Similar to the British initiative, President Obama on his second day in office instructed his head agencies in a memo to develop an Open Government Directive. This is an effort that moves the transparency dialogue from the 1966 Freedom of Information Act to transparency 2.0 where citizens can not only see what’s going on in their government, but participate and interact in the process. Other benefits of opening government can be found here.
Question: Is it possible that USAID, DFID, World Bank, and other international development agencies incorporate transparency and participatory initiatives that are blooming in domestic politics into their own agencies? It’s unlikely that they’ll do it voluntarily, but groups like AidInfo and web-based citizen movements are nudging them towards that process.
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