Liberation technologies

National Democratic Institute | NDI: NDI is a “nonprofit, nonpartisan organization working to support and strengthen democratic institutions worldwide through citizen participation, openness and accountability in government”. NDI has several leading projects in the intersection of technology and democracy.

Electronic Frontier Foundation | Defending Freedom in the Digital World: EFF is the leading civil liberties group defending your rights in the digital world. A group working on various aspects of internet regulation and their impact on civil, political and other rights.

Omidyar Network: A philanthropic firm that invests on market based efforts to social and political change. They have also invested in a number of initiatives to extend transparency by the use of technology.

OMG Standard – The Open Municipal Geodata Standard Organization: OMG is a collaborative for promoting more openness in Municipal data. It seeks to develop technical standards for sharing information across municipalities, develop case studies on public geocoded data and other things that are of interest to the open data community.

Data.gov: The home of data from various parts of US Federal government. Data is provided in open formats and it includes various tools to analyze data from across departments and also to build applications on the basis of the large volume of federal government datasets.

OpenSpending: The aim of OpenSpending.org is to track every government financial transaction across the world and present it in useful and engaging forms for everyone from a school-child to a data geek. The website has increasingly detailed datasets that provide us the ability to analyze at the macro level or drill down deep to spot contracts and purchases. Not surprisingly, the data is a lot richer for countries like the UK that have invested on releasing government information in great detail.

The Missing Open Data Policy – Sunlight Foundation: Sunlight Foundation argues that the open data policies so far discuss the format in which information should be released, but do not provide a overview on what information should be released in open data format. The article discusses some ways of regulating this.

Making open data real: A public consultation: Outlines some of the challenges in making making public sector information available in the ‘open data spirit’. It discusses the current set of laws in the UK and EU that govern open data related issues, and outlines some of the challenges for future discussion.

Lessons from Michigan: David Eaves writes about the government of Michigan initiative to create an innovation fund to create software useful to the government through collaborative projects that involve public, private and not-for profit organizations. He laments at the same time that the executive order does not require the software to be made open source, even though the government is paying for the creation of the software. Incidentally, I had a conversation with a former Principal Secretary for Municipalities in the undivided Andhra Pradesh (this was in early 2014). He mentioned that they had given a contract to a firm to develop a software for monitoring the collection […]

Twaweza.org: It is “a ten year citizen-centered initiative, focusing on large-scale change in East Africa. Twaweza believes that lasting change requires bottom-up action. We seek to foster conditions and expand opportunities through which millions of people can get information and make change happen in their own communities directly and by holding government to account”.

Global Digital Download by Internews: A weekly publication

David Eaves on technology, government and other topics: Prolific writer on the use of technology in government covering issues such as innovation, transparency, open data, etc.

Mamdawrinch: A Moroccan website that crowd sources incidents of corruption.

Articles on fighting corruption: An extensive list of published articles on corruption and on fighting corruption.

Global Network Initiative: GNI is a network for protecting and advancing freedom of expression and privacy in information and communications technologies

Information Technologies & International Development: Multi-disciplinary journal focusing on the relationship between ICT and development. Published by USC’s Annenburg school.

Rating of RTI laws around the world: This page contains information about a ranking of countries based on the strength of the right to information Law. Serbia has the highest ranking followed closely by India. Sweden, the first country to legislate the right to information, falls very low in the list.

Budapest Convention on Cybercrime: One of the conventions on governing the internet relating to cybercrime.

Cyberspace Policy Review by The White House: Documents on cyber space policy of the US government.

New Stanford computing lab imagines the mobile-social future: Project on making the mobile phone social at Stanford.