The right to make freedom of information requests is in enshrined in most democratic countries (Wikipedia says 70 countries have such legislation). But how often is that right actually invoked? My guess is that it’s vastly underutilized and that most members of the public would be surprised to know what they could find out  if only they asked. Part of the issue is that few people are aware of the appropriate process for filing a [...]

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There’s something else missing from recovery.gov altogether (see below):  the ability for citizens to have input into which projects get funded in their jurisdictions. Stimuluswatch.org, evidently a work in progress, provides an interesting (albeit imperfect) example of how this might work. Launched by team led by Jerry Brito at George Mason University, the site encourages citizens around the country with local knowledge about the proposed “shovel-ready” projects in their city to find, discuss and rate those projects. The list [...]

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Although recovery.gov was launched on the same day Obama signed the stimulus bill, I’ve been holding back on posting until there was a bit more substance to report on. There’s still no meat unfortunately (the graphic below is about as detailed as the information currently gets), but I’ll provide my 2 cents anyways. Obama has promised that the spending authorized by the stimulus bill will be subject to unprecedented transparency and accountability. Although there is [...]

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In the past, natural resource conservation came down to the capacity of an authoritative, centralized body in a geographic territory to monitor and control the exploitation of a given resource, whether forests, minerals or fisheries. Said regulators would issue permits for exploitation, often acting from a distance and on the basis of very sparse and intermittent data about the sustainability of those resource stocks (see study on Canada’s failure to regulate cod stocks on the [...]

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I had an interesting chat this morning with a colleague who is trying to get wikinomics infused into the culture and operations of the United Nations and finding it tough going so far.  Like many observers of the international scene, I find it frustrating to watch international organizations like the United Nations fail to shake-off the sclerosis and bureaucratic inertia that have marred attempts to get anywhere near meeting the millennium development goals by 2015. [...]

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Following other similar contests in DC and the UK, Sunlight Labs (an open source development team providing tools to make governments more transparent) has launched an “Apps for America” contest. If you have been following this blog then you already know what this is about. For those who haven’t, the idea is to crowdsource the creation of new applications that leverage public data sets (and in this case, the APIs that Sunlight Labs have made [...]

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Last week I gave a speech to a group of leaders from some of the world’s largest non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) including World Vision, Oxfam, CARE, The Nature Conservancy, Red Cross, and others. The group was assembled to assess the possibility of putting together an industry standard for project design, monitoring and evaluation (DM&E) that could increase the transparency and effectiveness of the sector. My role was to provoke debate about what the future of the [...]

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