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Update: On May 23, The Moscow Times reported that Russia had just “postponed” its entry into OGP. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian daily newspaper Kommersant that “we are not talking about winding up plans to join, but corrections in timing and the scale of participation are possible.” Open government advocate  David Eaves interprets this state of affairs to mean A) “transparency matters” and B) that “Russia may still be in OGP. Just not soon. And maybe never.” For now, Russia has withdrawn its letter of intent to join the Open Government Partnership and with that action, its commitments to transparency. OGP itself has  ”adjusted” its website to reflect the change, which is to say that the former page for Russia can no longer be found. So what will open government mean in the largest country in the world? Read on.

"Inevitably, there will be questions about what we are each prepared to sign up to," said British Prime Minister David Cameron in January 13, in his letter to fellow G8 leaders.  Four months later, Russia has made clear it clear what it wasn't willing to sing onto: the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The most recent update on Russia is that the Kremlin will be pursuing "open government" on its own terms.

Russia has withdrawn the letter of intent that it submitted on April 2012 in Brazil, at the first annual meeting of the Open Government Partnership. 

If the dominant binary of the 21st century is between open and closed, Russia looks more interested in opting toward more controllable, technocratic options that involve discretionary data releases instead of an independent judiciary or freedom of assembly or the press. 

One of the challenges of the Open Government Partnership has always been the criteria that a country had to pass to join and then continue to be a member. Russia's inclusion in OGP instantly raised eyebrows, doubts and fearslast April, given Russia's terrible record on press freedom.


"Russia's withdrawal from the OGP is a important reminder that open government isn't easy or politically simple," said Nathaniel Heller, executive director of Global Integrity. "While we don't yet fully understand why Russia is leaving OGP, it's safe to assume that the powers that be in the Kremlin decided that it was untenable to give reformers elsewhere in the Russian government the freedom to advance the open government agenda within the bureaucracy."

The choices of Russian Prime Minister Dimitri Medvedev, who had publicly supported joining the OGP and made open government a principle of his government, may well have been called into question by Russia's powerful president, Vladimir Putin. 

Medvedev had been signaling a move towards adopting more comfortable sorts of "openness" for some time, leading up to and following Russia joining the Open Government Partnership in December 2012. Russia's prime minister has sought to position himself as a reformer on the world stage, making a pitch for Russia being "open for business earlier this year at the Davos economic forum. Adopting substantive open government reforms could well make a difference with respect to foreign investors concerns about corruption and governance. 

While the Kremlin shows few signs of loosening its iron grip on national security and defense secrets, Russia faces the same need to modernize to meet the increasing demand of its citizens for online services as every developed nation. 

Even if Russia may not be continue its membership in the Open Government Partnership, its government's version of "openness" may endure, at least with respect to federal, city and state IT systems. Over the winter, a version of "Open Government a la Russe" - In Cyrillic большоеправительство or  or “big government” — seemed to accelerating at the national level and catching on in its capital. Maybe that will still happen, and Russion national action plan will go forward.

“While Russia’s approach to open government may be primarily technocratic, there’s a sense in which even the strongest legal requirements are only tools we give to our allies in governments,” said John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunight Foundation. “FOI officers analyzing records, or judges deciding whether or not to enforce laws are embodying both legal and cultural realities when they determine how open a country will be, just as much as policy makers who determine which policies to pass. While Russia’s initial commitment to OGP was likely a surprising boon for internal champions for reform, its withdrawal will also serve as a demonstration of the difficulty of making a political commitment to openness there.”

What is more clear, however, is that the Kremlin seems much more interested the sort of “open government” that creates economic value, as opposed to sustaining independent auditors, press or civil society that’s required in functional democracies. Plutocracy and kleptrocacy doesn’t typically co-exist well open, democratic governments — or vice versa.

Given that the United States efforts on open government prominently feature the pursuit of similar value in releasing government data, Russia’s focus isn’t novel. In fact, “open data” is part of more than half of the plans of the participating countries in OGP, along with e-government reforms. In May of 2012, a presidential declaration directed governmental bodies to open up government data.

In February, Moscow launched an open data platform, at data.mos.ru, that supplied material fordigital atlas of the city. Russia established an “open data council” the same month. Those steps forward could stand to benefit Russian citizens and bring some tangential benefits to transparency and accountability, if Russia and its cities can stomach the release of embarrassing data about spending, budgets or performance.

While some accounts of open government in Russia highlighted the potential of Russia to tap into new opportunities for innovation afforded by connected citizenry that exist around the world, crackdowns on civil society and transparency organizations have sorely tested the Russian government’s credibility on the issue. This trial of anti-corruption blogger Alexey Navalny for corruption this spring showed how far Russia has to go.

“Open government isn’t just open data nor is it e-government, two areas in which the Russian Federal had appeared to be willing to engage on the open government agenda,” said Heller. “Many observers doubted how far Russia could take open government in a climate of political repression, civil society crackdowns, and judicial abuse of power.”

Today’s news looks like a victory of conservatives in the Kremlin over government reformers interested in reducing corruption and adopting modern public sector management techniques. “We need to use modern technologies, crowd sourcing,” said Medvedev said in January 2013. “Those technologies change the status and enhance the legitimacy of decisions made in government.”

Changes in technology will undoubtedly influence Russia, as they will every country, albeit within the cultural and economic context of each. This withdrawal from OGP, however, may be a missed opportunity for civil society, at least with respect to losing a lever for reform, reduced corruption and institutions accountable to the people. Leaving the partnership suggests that Russia may be a bit scared of real transparency, or least the sort where the national government willing allows itself to be criticized by civil society and foreign non-governmental organizations.

It’s something of a mixed victory for the Open Government Partnership, too: getting to be a member and stay one means something, after all.

“For the Open Government Partnership, this will be seen as a bit of a blow to their progress, but its success was never predicated on getting every qualifying government to join,” said Wonderlich. “In a sense, Russia’s withdrawal may alleviate the need for OGP to grapple with Russia’s recent, severe treatment of NGOs there. More broadly, Russia’s withdrawal may better define the space in which the OGP mechanism can function well. Building a movement around commitments from heads of state has allowed OGP’s ranks to rapidly grow, but we’re also probably entering a new time for OGP, where the depth and reliability of those commitments will become clearer. Transitions between governments, domestic politics, corruption scandals, hypocritical behavior, uncooperative legislatures, exclusion of domestic NGOs, and internal power struggles may all threaten individual national commitments, and OGP will need to determine how to adapt to each of these challenges. OGP will need to determine whether it wants to be the arbiter of appropriate behavior on each of these dimensions, or whether its role is better left to the commitments and National Action Plans on which it was founded. “

If OGP is to endure and have a meaningful impact on the world, its imprimatur has to have integrity and some weight of moral justice, based upon internationally shared norms on human rights and civil liberties. As press freedom goes, so to does open government and democracy.

“International boosters of open government may want to remain cautious at embracing open government reformers at the first whiff of ‘openness’ or rhetorical commitment to the agenda,” said Heller. “Within weeks of Russia first making noise around joining OGP, the World Bank and others rushed to assemble a major international conference in the country around open government to boost reformers inside the bureaucracy as they sought to move the country into OGP. While no one should criticize those efforts, they are a sobering reminder that initial rhetorical commitment to open government can only take us so far, and it’s wise to keep the political powder dry for other downstream fights.”

Given the scale of bribery and the impact of corruption on growth, Russians can only hope that more “openness” with teeth comes to their country soon.

-- Alexander Howard

Originally posted on http://e-pluribusunum.com/

If you haven't already read the news about the Justice Department snooping on the Associated Press' newsroom in an attempt to ferret out government leakers, prepare to be nauseated.

This comes just days after the White House trumpeted a widely-applauded open data policy that seeks to proactively liberate vast amounts of data in an attempt to shine light on the inner workings of the very same government.

Go and try to reconcile those two things: a steady march towards clamping down on national security information with a liberal open data policy. I certainly can't. And I'm beginning to wonder if we're starting to see the limits of open government under the Obama White House.

This administration's track record on what can be argued are the easier bits of open government is more than laudable. An initial Open Government Directive has been augmented with the new open data policy, and we've witnessed the launch of an international Open Government Partnership, which began as a White House brainchild. But during that very same period we've witnessed the administration getting worse on the politically harder bits: freedom of information response times have deteriorated, reporters are being chased down to divulge their sources, and now entire newsrooms are apparently being targeted in broad, scarily police state-style monitoring. What the heck is going on here?

Here at Global Integrity, we've warned repeatedly about the risks of governments trying to be half-pregnant on open government. It just doesn't work. Some think that open data itself is equivalent to open government while others -- perhaps including the current US administration -- seem content to make progress on the technocratic pieces while allowing core pillars of the open government agenda to wither, such as access to information and civil liberties. While we know that governments don't transform themselves overnight, we do worry deeply when we witness deliberate backsliding by governments on pieces of the open government agenda, whether South Africa's Secrecy Bill, Hungary's recent watering down of its freedom of information legislation, or American schizophrenia around the idea that open government can take root in a climate of barely-legal government surveillance and intrusion.

Open government advocates have been asking questions about whether countries such as South Africa and the Philippines, both of which sit on the Open Government Partnership steering committee, are truly committed to the open government agenda in light of recent backsliding. Unfortunately, it's now time to ask the same of the United States.

-- Nathaniel Heller

A comprehensive tool that tracks Chinese development finance was released April 29^th by AidData, a partnership between Brigham Young University, the College of William and Mary, and fellow OpenGov Hub tenant, Development Gateway. Released at the Center for Global Development, the online database platform tracks development finance flows to the continent from 2000-2011. Check a video of the presentation here.

“Our goal is to provide a stronger empirical foundation for analysis of the nature, distribution, and impact of China's overseas development finance activities in Africa,” said Stephen Davenport, Co-Executive Director of AidData and Senior Director of Innovation and Partnerships at Development Gateway.

“The BRIC countries are rapidly expanding their grant and overseas lending activities, especially China,” Davenport said, “but nobody has been able to convince China to participate in the emerging transparency regime for global development finance. They say they are transparent with their recipients - and that they don’t see a need to go any further.”

As of May 3, 2013, the platform tracked 1,442 non-investment projects valued at $74.11 billion, with 70% of those projects marked as underway or completed. The report was compiled using AidData’s new media-based data collection methodology, which leverages media report, public government records, and case study research to track individual projects funded by the Chinese government, but the methodology does not come without limitations.

“We know that the methodology is not perfect, but we think it's a very good initial point of departure. If nothing else, it will instigate a discussion of how Chinese development finance data should be collected, vetted, and curated,” he added, “This information is otherwise incredibly difficult to access, so the dataset will add value and generate interest at many levels.”

The online platform at china.aiddata.org enables users to quickly filter, manipulate, and visualize the data. The dataset also serves as a crowdsourcing tool. Users can contribute to the project-level data by providing additional information about specific projects, such as media reports, documents, videos, and photographs, as well as suggest new projects which were previously unidentified.

AidData’s vision is to improve and apply this methodology to track international development finance from other countries that do not participate in official reporting systems.

“The goal is to move beyond the traditional sources of development finance,” Davenport added. “We want to go deeper into the BRIC countries and see how they are financing development around the world.”

--Julio C. Urdaneta

Over the last 18 months, the small but agile Indaba team has worked tirelessly to bring some exciting enhancements to the platform, (Indaba 3.0 as I like to call it), as well as launch some cool projects.  Our hope with these new changes is to further streamline the online data collection process for colleagues and partners around the world.

As our Executive Director, Nathaniel Heller, alluded to in his blog post, “Why We're Investing in Moving Legacy Data Into Indaba” with the changes to the platform, Indaba will now give project managers a way to more easily design, launch and manage the day-to-day aspects of their projects.  

With the help of existing Indaba user insights, we narrowed down the scope of our ever long “wish-list” of platform upgrades functionalities and user interface enhancements.  The major change to the platform includes a whole new interface, Control Panel, which allows project managers and support staff to build key components of their work (uploading questions, creating reusable surveys, adding project contributors and units of analysis.)  

We also updated user functionalities for the existing platform interface, Fieldwork Manager, used by field contributors and project managers to amass data in an organized fashion. It is our hope that changes to this part of Indaba will greatly enhance the data collection process.

Now project managers can assign tasks to users from a “queue” system, which filters through hundreds, if not more, tasks per project. Managers can “swap” different people from one job to another to suit the needs of the project.

One of the upgrades I am most excited about is the ability for managers to ask and send questions to anyone working on the project. This could be done during any of the review or edit stages (as defined by the organization creating a project).  Previously, Indaba would only allow managers to ask questions to the original respondent who created the content. This feature is particularly helpful when a manager needs further clarification on the way something was edited or if a reviewer provides a new source of information and the relevance is not clearly articulated. This feature could also be useful if a project requires verification feedback regarding specific data or information collected from a government official, business entity, etc.

Needless to say, we are thankful to our developers OpenConcept Systems (OCS) who worked tirelessly to ensure the new changes were installed in a timely manner and with as few “bugs” as possible.

-- Monika Shepard

This week is an exciting week for the Indaba fieldwork platform. After several months of design, development, and testing, we went live today with some new and powerful features, notably Control Panel (which allows project managers to more easily design and launch their projects) and important enhancements to Fieldwork Manager (like being able to send Question Lists to any user on a project at any point in the workflow) We'll dive more deeply into these upgrades and what they mean for running more powerful and efficient Indaba projects in a separate post.

Less visible is the fact that we've also quietly launched an experimental approach to importing legacy data into Indaba from other systems/data files. This has been a use case identified for many years by Indaba users (including us here at Global Integrity): "Great that I can run my new project on Indaba, but is there a way for me to migrate the past ten years of data I've already published into the platform?" Until now the answer was basically, "No," absent a willingness to brute force the solution by copying and pasting potentially thousands of spreadsheet cells or published web pages into a "new" Indaba project. And frankly no one wants to do that.

To try and solve this challenge, we're partnering with Seabourne and longtime Indaba developers OpenConcept Systems (OCS) to test a machine-driven method for importing legacy data into Indaba. Here's the basic approach:

- We've developed a template and data schema for what is necessary to import questionnaire-style information into Indaba in a structured manner that meets Indaba's data model needs.

- Seaborne's nifty Delray software -- which "eats" random unstructured data from disparate sources and then spits it back out in a fully customized and structured package -- will then eat several years' worth of Global Integrity legacy data currently hosted off of Indaba. In practice we are talking about the Global Integrity Reports from 2006 - 2009 and a few early Local Integrity Initiative projects.

- Delray will then give us a nice, Indaba-ready set of files containing our old data that is ready for import.

- Our friends at OCS will then take the import file, drop it into Indaba's core database, and (hopefully!) our questionnaires will automagically rebuild themselves without any human intervention. We'll then be able to use Publisher's standard features, such as web widgets, to quickly republish hundreds of pages of legacy reports and scorecards on our website.

Naturally, something probably will and should go wrong the first time we try this. But we're hoping to test this process on ourselves first, and if/when it works be able to offer it to others in the future at low cost to help with legacy data migration needs. Stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks.

-- Nathaniel Heller

There's been an ongoing debate within the OpenGov Hub recently around “sustainable” non-profits.

The basic concern is that traditional non-profit organizations are overly dependent on grants funding to keep the lights on and are at risk of going out of business whenever a grant or two falls through. The advice given by some colleagues is for non-profits to instead generate earned revenue from non-grant sources and act more like businesses in monetizing their assets.

I'm sympathetic with the goal of diversifying revenue streams but worry that the term “sustainability,” at least when applied to social sector non-profits, is a misleading term that steers many organizations towards a likely-to-fail strategy of trying to sell goods and services. A better approach for the vast majority of groups would be to diversify their philanthropic funding sources rather than attempt a proverbial bake sale. There are several myths contributing to this confusion that deserve some unpacking.

Myth #1: Selling goods and services to clients is easier than raising grants. I'd challenge anyone who thinks that closing a sale is materially easier than closing a grant. Having done both -- at Global Integrity and through our revenue-generating custom research service Foglamp -- I know firsthand that most commercial sales efforts are as labor intensive as any grant seeking process. This is particularly true when attempting to sell enterprise-grade services to large clients; the sales cycles are similarly long, require multiple layers of approval, and the bureaucracies involved can be daunting. In my view it's a wash as to whether raising a $200,000 grant from a foundation is any harder than selling a $200,000 service agreement to a commercial client. And the requisite skill sets are nearly identical: any good philanthropic fundraiser knows that what he or she is doing is classic sales work at the end of the day.

Myth #2: Selling goods and services to clients is more reliable than raising grants.  Right, because the market's appetite for your goods and services will never change, and people will buy your widget forever. Probably not true. While grants fundraising is certainly subject to fads and trends, it's likely far less prone to whipsawing than the commercial market. No successful company sits ideally by assuming the market will always remain stagnant. The good ones are constantly attempting to innovate and get ahead of the curve. That requires real product development strategy and non-trivial investments into experimentation and R&D, capital-intensive processes that the typical non-profit is unlikely to be able to invest in adequately. So while it may be possible for a non-profit to bring a successful product or service to the markets once, the chances of that organization keeping up with the competition is slimmer. The long-term risks of being overtaken by market trends are significant.

Myth #3: Grants funding is erratic and time bound. True, but arguably no more of a challenge than your favorite client walking away after five years to use a different service provider or product. “Sustainable” firms or non-profits aren't ones that simply rely on the same pool of clients or donors for decades. They are constantly seeking more durable revenue streams and attempting to “upgrade” the quality of their sources of revenue. They are forced to embrace a constant churn in revenue sources. Speaking from personal experience, Global Integrity's three most important philanthropic donors from our first year in business (2006) haven't given us a dime in more than three years. Yet we've managed to nearly triple our overall revenue in that same time period by diversifying and upgrading the quality of our donors.

Should non-profits sit idly by and rely solely on traditional grants funding? Not necessarily. Supplementing grants funding with earned revenue streams can be an important safeguard against the vagaries of philanthropic donors while providing steadier sources of cash flow. But in the vast majority of cases, my instinct is that non-profits will achieve greater levels of stability and predictability in their funding streams -- that elusive “sustainability” -- by expanding their work streams and diversifying their philanthropic funding sources rather than trying to build businesses within the walls of the non-profit. Relying on a single project to bring in indefinite grants funding is indeed almost certain to fail. Instead, launching new projects and initiatives that fit the organization's strategy offers a chance to tap new and diverse sources of grants support year after year. That strikes me as a better approach to non-profit sustainability.

-- Nathaniel Heller

Positions are open indefinitely until filled. We are actively looking in these countries: Mali, Burkina Faso, Iceland, Japan, Korea, Norway, UAE, Qatar, Jamaica, Zambia, Namibia, Finland, Thailand, New Zealand, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay and Canada. 

Global Integrity is embarking on a partnership with the World Wide Web Foundation to prepare the 2013 Web Index.  The Web Index is the first multi-dimensional measure of the Web’s use, utility and impact. In 2012, the Web Index covered 61 developed and developing countries, incorporating indicators that assess the political, economic and social impact of the Web; in 2013 coverage will be increased to roughly 80 countries.  The Web Index is a tool that helps advocates and policy analysts draw upon actionable measures to identify impediments and track improvements in Web access and affordability.  The Web Index also helps inform decision-makers and regulators as to what changes can be made to Web governance in country to help achieve greater and more sustainable development outcomes.

This effort will require a global team of reporters and reviewers around the world to conduct original research and data gathering that will feed into the final 2013 Web Index. For information on the requirements and how to apply, please see the Fact Sheet below. 

FACT SHEET

Who We Are Looking For:  Professionals from the fields of journalism, non-governmental organization, academia and the private sector with proven record in performing high-quality interviews and desk research, meeting deadlines, and promptly responding to queries as part of a large research team. Interested candidates, including those colleagues who have worked with us before, should apply online by visiting http://www.tfaforms.com/279604  Positions are open indefinitely until filled.

Project Roles:

Lead Researcher: An experienced journalist (preferred) or researcher with proven experience doing desk research, original interviews of key informants and obtaining other current hard information to assess social and economic issues. The indicators to be researched and scored for the Web Index involve some specific technical questions related to both technology and economic development, so knowledge of the Web, Web governance, and/or international development issues is preferred but not absolutely necessary.

A strong command of English is required. Lead researchers must be working in the country of study, be independent of government (having not served in a government position for at least three years), and have at least 5 years of relevant professional experience.

Reviewers: They play a key role in the data quality control process by reading and providing commentary on the information submitted by the Lead Researcher. They are asked to provide feedback on whether they feel an indicator is accurate, relevant and fair. Knowledge on Web architecture and systems, Web legal and regulatory frameworks, and use of the web for social, economic, or political development is required. A strong command of English is required. There will be three types of Reviewers:

-Country Reviewers: These are experts in a specific country and have a deep knowledge of the local reality in relation to the Web, Web governance, and/or international development issues.

-Functional Reviewers: These are experts with a deep knowledge of at least one of the core dimensions of the Web Index (institutional infrastructure, Web, communications, economic impact, political impact, gender, and social impact). They will review many if not all of the countries covered in the 2013 Web Index, but will only be asked to review the indicators that fall within their area of expertise for each of the countries.

-Regional Reviewers: They are familiar with the Web and information and communications policy in a particular region of the world. Regional reviewers will be asked to review all indicators for the countries that fall within their region of expertise.

Timing and necessary availability: Lead Researchers will begin their fieldwork in May 2013, have four weeks to submit answers to roughly 100 indicators (questions), and must be available to promptly clarify any aspect of their research through July 2013. Reviewers must be available to perform their review of the data between June and August 2013 and must be available to do the review at short notice and with a quick turn around (2-3 days).

Compensation: Compensation for Lead Researchers will be US$1,000 for gathering data, scoring the indicators and responding to queries and requests for feedback. Compensation for Country and Regional Reviewers will be approximately $200 per country reviewed, and for the Functional Reviewers it will depend on number of countries and indicators assigned for review. All contributors to the project will be publicly acknowledged.

Country coverage: Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Benin, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Korea (Republic of), Mali, Mauritius, Mexico, Morocco, Namibia, Nepal, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Russian Federation, Senegal, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States of America, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, Zimbabwe. New countries added April 15: Zambia, Rwanda, Botswana, Jamaica, Peru, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Hungary, Belgium, Netherlands, Estonia, Greece, Denmark, Czech Republic, Austria, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain. 

Who We Are:

Global Integrity is anon-profit, non-partisan organization that champions transparent and accountable government around the world by producing innovative research and technologies that inform, connect, and empower civic, private, and public reformers seeking more open societies.

The World Wide Web Foundation is a non-profit organization devoted to achieving a world in which all people can use the Web to communicate, collaborate and innovate freely, building bridges across the divides that threaten our shared future.

For Feihu Li, his time at Global Integrity has been one of discovery.

“I find Global Integrity’s work compelling,” Li, 35, said. “I have learned many things about transparency and accountability that I hope to bring to China.”

An accomplished news editor at the Beijing headquarters of Chinese news agency Xinhua, Li is in the middle of a year-long American experience as a Hubert Humphrey fellow, a program that offers non-degree academic studies and related professional experience in the United States for mid-career professionals.

Li has been interning with Global Integrity for one month, working with our office manager Christina Crawley organizing different events around the OpenGov Hub and helping Global Integrity with some special projects.

After his time at the Global Integrity headquarters in Washington, D.C., Li will continue to work on his academic fellowship before going back to China in June.

-- Julio Urdaneta

A group of Argentinean technologists, organized in a new political party, is taking a risky move to bring open government to the Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires (whose iconic tower is pictured above).

The nascent political organization, Partido de la Red (Net Party), seeks to propose and elect candidates to the legislature that will support ordinances and legislation based exclusively on the vote of regular citizens through a software platform, available on the Internet.

“Our political party is the software,” said Pía Mancini, director of Fundación Democracia en Red (Net Democracy Foundation), the organization behind the development of the platform. “Developing the software is the most important part.  Our software seeks to take advantage of the intelligence of the collective.”

Users will undergo a vetting process before being able to use the software, Mancini said, to avoid manipulation of the voting mechanism. “We want to make sure that whoever votes is a member of the community who cares about the issue at hand, not somebody who will benefit of the outcome of a proposed legislation,” Mancini, 30, said.

The party has chosen to start with the legislature of Buenos Aires since the city boasts the largest number of Internet users in the South American nation, said technologist Santiago Siri, head programmer of the software platform. The Argentine capital, with a population of 12 million, is also mired in significant urban problems, from a chaotic transportation system and unreliable public services to rampant crime.

The new party is there not only to bring the people’s voices forward as a way to find solutions for these problems, Siri, 29, said, but as a way to reset the way democracy is conceived among citizens.

“We are not a revolution or a reform,” he said. “We are an upgrade.”

More info on this initiative is available (in Spanish) at their Wiki site.

Are there similar initiatives in your area? If so, have they been successful? What would you recommend to Mancini and Siri to make their idea better? Or do you think they are naïve in their approach? Share your thoughts in our comments below.

--Julio C. Urdaneta

What’s the image of our country?

This was just one among the many questions posed by participants at the “Solution in Institutions: Combating Corruption between the State and the Society” conference, held in Cairo, Egypt on Feb. 27 and organized by Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), working in partnership with the Federation of Economic Development Associations and the United Group. A picture of some of the attendees is shown above. 

Facing the enormous challenges of democratic transition and uncertainties of the future, the over 120 participants in the conference seemed to be eager to tackle perhaps most daunting task for the new (and every future) Egyptian government – the role of state institutions in the fight against corruption.

Global Integrity participated in this conference talking about one of manifestations of bad governance that we have been particularly keen on in our research thus far – the problem of implementation gap between norms and regulations on the books and their implementation in practice. 

Our organization and the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) recently co-authored a manual for key public stakeholders (the government, private sector and the civil society) on what are the origins of implementation gap, offering some concrete solutions for how to best address this problematic.

As the manual states in one of its opening lines – all too often the act of adopting a legal framework is regarded as an end in itself as it assumes that laws are administered and services delivered.

In addition, new democracies are way too often assessed on the basis of how many laws they have managed to adopt, rather than allowing them time to make these reforms meaningful, worth their efforts and – at their own pace.

Overly ambitious and unrealistic reforms can be very counterproductive. Instead of motivating people to action, they tend to add additional burden to the already overstretched capacities of national governments.

There is no silver bullet for how to approach the complex challenges of governing. Consequently, Global Integrity and CIPE don’t offer an ultimate solution for closing the implementation gap, let alone the other related issues. Nevertheless, we share the point that forcing governments into unrealistic reforms will ultimately over-bureaucratize and demotivate state administrations.

We are very encouraged by the input and questions from our Egyptian colleagues in the conference. With representatives of all three key stakeholders in attendance, their unequivocal support for realistic and sustainable long-term reforms in Egypt was very refreshing.

In our globalized world, the division between good and bad guys when it comes to transparency, accountability and governance in general is no longer plausible. Just like nations cannot be blamed for failed policies of their governments. At best, we can talk about better and worse governance solutions.

In this sense, we warmly salute the willingness and enthusiasm of participants in the conference, as well as all those in the Egyptian society who fight for better lives of their fellow citizens.

From what we could see in the conference, the image of Egypt is very positive.

And its future bright.  

-- Marko Tomicic

--Photo courtesy of CIPE

There's a new code.org celebrity video making the rounds that features tech luminaries such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Will.i.am (wait, you didn't know he was a technologist?) advocating the idea that all kids should learn to code. It's a well-produced video featuring famous luminaries and comes on the heels of an ongoing debate around whether all of us -- even the mayor of New York City -- should be able to program software. 

I have two worries about the video: 1) it's wrong, and 2) peers in the social sector will perceive it as more proof positive that in order to have social impact in the 21st century you need to be able to build an app. I think there's a better approach: focus on empowering technology users, especially in the social sector, to make more intelligent decisions about their technology choices while allowing specialists to remain the actual coders.

Why You Shouldn't Learn to Code

The thrust of the code.org argument in favor of learning to code is that software is everywhere and runs everything, so if you don't know how to program software you are as dysfunctional as someone who can't read or write. This is flawed for more than one reason, not least of which because it implies that software programming is the most important skill set in our contemporary world. 

As a thought experiment, here are a few other skill sets that I would argue are just as important (if not more important) than coding in that very same contemporary world:

1) The ability to understand legalese. If you think databases and code rule the world, understanding their Terms of Service is equally important. Facebook, Microsoft and Google only make money because you allow them to through acceptance of those dozens of pages of dense, massively lawyered TOS. Through the most recent wave of technology patent wars, we're now seeing lawyers, not programmers, take the driver's seat in dictating the evolution of the technology sector. 

2) The ability to read a balance sheet. Basic accounting and finance skills are no less essential to survival in the current era as computer programming. What nearly caused a second Great Depression was not bad code but bad finance and shoddy accounting.

3) The ability to write well. It may not be in book form any more, but the ability to lay out and defend a cogent point of view in written form is an increasingly (and worrisomely) rare skill. The medium might have evolved to blogs, but thought leaders still shape the dialogue and push big new ideas onto the public consciousness because they are stellar writers, not because they can code. And big ideas still matter.

Is software an extremely important facet of contemporary life? Absolutely. Is it definitely more important than writing well, being able to call BS on an income statement, or the ability to intelligently push back when a lawyer pressures you to sign something? Absolutely not. So why aren't we pressuring everyone to go to law school, get an MBA, or take writing workshops?

A Happy Medium

Rather than advocate an absolutist approach that everyone should code, a more realistic and smarter tactic would be to encourage everyone to understand the basic tenets of computer programming, especially object oriented programming. This is akin to being able to push back on the lawyer even though you didn't go to law school, or to understand when a balance sheet smells fishy even though you're not a CFO. Encouraging everyone to be exposed to Computer programming 101 strikes me as a perfectly plausible idea because it would empower lay users to make more intelligent decisions about technology without having to absorb the massive opportunity costs associated with actually mastering the various programming languages.

Where I would argue we want to be is a place where more people understand the importance and relevance of key programming concepts such as data models, system architecture, APIs, and database structure rather than non-specialists being pressured into mastering Java, PHP, or C++. We should strive for an army of informed and empowered users who can make intelligent decisions about technology. When necessary, they can then intelligently hire and oversee specialists to perform the actual coding.

What it Means for the Social Sector

The universe in which I inhabit -- the social sector -- is notorious for being behind the curve when it comes to technology. The visceral response to that is often to assume that we therefore must embrace technology (whatever that means) and plenty of money and energy goes wasted in a quixotic attempt to turn advocates into hackers. 

Rather than overreact to the code.org video (and the larger argument being pushed that everyone should learn to code), smart social sector actors would be wise to focus on becoming well-informed clients that can weigh the costs and benefits of key technology strategies and investments without having to actually implement the solutions themselves. In other words: become familiar enough with the jargon, terminology, products, and platforms to be able to make an informed decision…and stop there. To take a hypothetical: I don't want Human Rights Watch to suddenly launch a "labs" division with dozens of programmers cranking out apps. Instead, I want them to focus on what they do well (campaigning and legal work) while making smart and informed decisions about a) whether the need an app at all, b) who to hire to build the app, and c) how they (as the client) are integral to the discovery and needs assessment process.

The bottom-line: we don't all need to code. But we do all need to know when to call the coders.

-- Nathaniel Heller

Earlier this week, the Knight Foundation opened a new Knight News Challenge, this time focused on promoting innovative approaches to "open government." The announcement has received quite a bit of attention; any time you commit up to US$5 million in funding for something, people's ears tend to prick up.

We've spent plenty of time here at Global Integrity thinking about the definition, potential, and limits of open government in the past few years.  We invest heavy amounts of effort into making the Open Government Partnership work and generally think that open government is a really good thing. Personally, I track the continued conflation of "open data" with "open government" over at this Tumblr.

In short, we pay very close attention to the uses and abuses of open government as a term of art. Here's what we're seeing so far come out of the Knight News Challenge on open government that both excites and worries us.

Open government = technology for governance?

Happily, the positioning and language behind the contest avoids the conflation of "open data" with "open government," which can be a very misleading mistake. Rather, what we are picking up is a tendency to equate technology, or more specifically citizens + technology, with open government. The contest is framed as a way to "improve the way governments and citizens interact," but virtually all of the examples involve leveraging technology or "civic hacking."

Don't get us wrong, we love technology; we even build software to advance our own work. But open government goes well beyond technology and software tools. It involves a fundamental reorientation of power and decision-making, two decidedly non-technical (but pretty important) things. We hope to see at least some contest entries focused explicitly around non-technology ideas.

We still don't know what open government really means.

We've discussed this ad nauseam elsewhere; see our "Working Definition of Open Government" for how we think the term might be defined. The Open Government Standards project is another place to find some ideas (although please let us know in the comments if anyone is keeping that alive…it seems to have gone silent).

The News Challenge takes a, well, relaxed approach to any sort of definition. Per the contest brief: "Our definition of 'open government' is broad, and ranges from small projects within existing structures to ambitious attempts to create entirely new ones. To use an architectural analogy, we’re interested in everything from putting a new coat of paint on the house to razing the house and replacing it with a geodesic dome."

So basically anything involving government, civic participation, and technology, one can surmise. We like the idea of not pigeonholing the contest through too narrow of a definition, but one wonders just how messy and disparate the entries might end up being without a sharper focus.

Absent an agreed definition, the "history" of open government remains controversial territory.

Knight seems to take the post-2009/U.S. Open Government Directive approach to this history:

"The idea of open government has had a rather winding journey—from the first datasets opened to the public, to apps for reporting potholes, to open systems that track the movement of disease across the world. Dedicated groups of talented people have attempted everything from opening IRS data locked in millions of PDFs to collectively writing legislation online."

Other scholars and practitioners strongly disagree, however, taking a far more expansive view of the movement. In their influential paper on the distinction between open data and open government, Harlan Yu and David Robinson trace the history of open government in the United States back to the post-World War II era. Early administrative reforms and advocacy efforts following the war in the United States, for example, would culminate in the Freedom of Information Act in 1966, an absolutely fundamental aspect of open government. To treat open government as something discovered in early 2009 when President Barack Obama and his team published the Open Government Directive is to ignore more than fifty years of prior work and some valuable perspective.

Cheers to Knight

While we might choose to craft certain aspects of this News Challenge differently ourselves, Knight should be commended for wading into this potentially controversial territory. If we're lucky, we'll see some impressive new ideas funded that will lead to answers for a number of the questions raised above.

-- Nathaniel Heller

We have been reviewing idea submissions for many weeks now and are nearly ready to take a shortlist to our final Lightning Round.  Throughout the evaluation process, we made some unexpected observations.  In one case, the shockingly different ideas we had called for missed a seemingly crucial step.

Whether it’s journalists tracking money flows in politics, mappers visualizing education disparities across communities, or non-profits publishing their Aid-funded projects, those working to illuminate public information, engage citizens in decision-making, and strengthen mechanisms for holding the responsible to account are using a myriad of tools.

Transparency, accountability, and participation, however, are vague enough terms to invoke them without targeting tangible challenges.

With these difficult-to-concretize goals, the T&A community shows signs of falling prey to a trap that generates tools, but begs the question, what are they for? Are they working to address problems, or are they in search of them?

At Global Integrity, we came face-to-face with this issue while vetting ideas submitted to our innovation fund, TESTING 1 2 3.

A select few tools grabbed our attention right off the bat, owing to their innovativeness – unique designs that excited us because we had never heard about them before.  It was only when we reviewed them more carefully that we noticed a shared failure to “address a specific, identifiable challenge,” one of our key criterion for selection.

Flashy ideas, such as transforming the functionality of a common tech tool or finding a niche application for an adopted method, can run the risk of leapfrogging the goal and landing at the solution.

The question is, does this matter?  Are we at risk of producing tools that yield disappointing results? Or can there be unexpected benefits to them – for example, can a tool conceived to help X end up fixing Y?

Send us your examples to help answer these questions.  We want to figure out the best way to approach this issue and steer research and innovation towards the challenges we seek to address.

--Nicole Anand

--Photo Credit: Beshef/Flickr

Global Integrity is pleased to formally publish a new data set assessing governance and anti-corruption measures at the local level in the Philippines, the Philippines Local Governance Transparency and Accountability Indicators. The indicators were jointly developed by the La Salle Institute of Governance (LSIG) and Global Integrity with input from a variety of Filipino stakeholders.

The indicators assess the strengths and weaknesses of mechanisms designed to promote transparency and accountability in Philippine local governance. With the city/municipal level as the basic unit of analysis, the ultimate objective of the indicators is to systematically identify best practices and areas for improvement, thereby empowering local stakeholders to plan and implement evidence-based policy and institutional reforms to strengthen transparency and accountability in local governance.

Gathered in ten of the country’s most important municipalities and cities, the indicators include a total of 205 specific questions that were scored by local researchers through a combination of intensive desk research and hundreds of original interviews with local stakeholders. These indicators are spread over six categories representing various aspects of transparency and accountability in local governance. The categories are:

1. Civil Society, Public Information and Media
2. Local Elections
3. Local Government Accountability
4. Local Fiscal Processes
5. Local Civil Service
6. Local Regulatory Functions

Ten municipalities were assessed: Balanga City, Carmen, Lapu Lapu City, Lawann-Eastern Samar, Miag ao-Ilollo, Quezon City, Santa Maria-Laguna, Tacurong City-Sultan Kudarat, Taytay-Rizal, and Zamboanga City.

Project background

The Philippines present an intriguing case of local governance reform because of its experiments with decentralization and grass roots participatory democratic governance, especially with the passage of the Local Government Code of 1991. The Code provides local governance/administrative units of municipalities and provinces, i.e., the barangay, more autonomy in fiscal, executive, and legislative decision-making. Stress is placed throughout on active citizen participation in local governance such as the delivery of public services. Despite the importance of the devolution of power to local governance units, however, there are still relatively few empirical studies of the operations of local governance particularly at the barangay level. The indicators we’ve published through this project are a contribution to building more robust evidence-based studies of Philippines local governance.   

Ultimately, the local assessments aim to generate data that could be used in discussions about policy and institutional reforms that promote greater transparency and accountability in local governance. The overall goal is to contribute to these discussions both within the local areas included in the assessment, as well as outside these areas, whether at the national level or in other cities and municipalities in the country. 

Methodology

The project indicators are based on an extensive review of the transparency and accountability literature, and an examination of what are relevant in the Philippine local context. These mechanisms comprise “best practices” for improving transparency and accountability that have been found to work well in various parts of the Philippines and internationally. They include public disclosure requirements, conflicts-of-interest regulations, oversight institutions, citizen participation, and rules that limit discretionary decision-making. In a democratic context, the role of elections as potentially powerful mechanisms for public accountability is also included.

The indicators, taken in their entirety, aim to capture the extent to which these mechanisms for improving transparency and accountability are in place (existence indicators), whether the design of these mechanisms indicate that they are likely to work (effectiveness indicators), and whether citizens are able to adequately utilize these mechanisms (access indicators). The Philippines local indicators therefore contain a combination of de jure and de facto indicators that look at laws and institutions “on the books,” as well as their implementation and enforcement in practice.

Findings at a Glance

Preliminary findings from these municipalities include:

•    A significantly large “implementation gap” (i.e., the difference between a municipality’s legal framework and the implementation and enforcement of those laws) in Taytay-Rizal. These gaps are especially pronounced in the areas of citizen access to certain public information (e.g., procurement records), input in budget allocations and decision-making as well as the effectiveness of the audit agency. 

•    Relatively strong transparency institutions and accountability mechanisms in barangays across municipalities. The exception is Taytay-Rizal, where citizens’ capacity to participate in barangay assemblies are constrained in part because of small venues and the perception by some that the assemblies are legitimation tools for officials.    

•    Although local CSOs are active in the policy-making process in municipalities, the level of their participation is uneven. Some CSOs meet with Local Special Bodies frequently, while in other municipalities such as Quezon City only selected CSOs are allowed to participate, thus raising questions about their impartiality.     

•    Weak accountability mechanisms in political financing. Regulations on individual funding support for candidates, in particular, are unevenly enforced in Lapu Lapu City, Quezon City, and Taytay-Rizal. However, robust investigations of individual campaigns are more evident in Zamboanga City.   

•    Poor legal framework that protects whistle-blowers against recrimination and other negative consequences in several municipalities. 

Visit the project homepage to access full interactive scorecards for all ten municipalities as well as our Downloads page and Indaba’s Publisher tool for bulk data downloads of the project.

-- Nathaniel Heller & Raymond June

-- Photo by Missy and The Universe