Useful links

Sunlight Foundation: The foundation is, “a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for open government globally and uses technology to make government more accountable to all. We do so by creating tools, open data, policy recommendations, journalism and grant opportunities to dramatically expand access to vital government information to create accountability of our public officials”. The website is a great source of information on open data policy, political financing and a range of other topics in the intersection of technology and transparency.

Public Database Indexing Guidelines: North Carolina is mandated by law to maintain an index of all electronic public records with description of available data. This is a guideline prepared by the State government to prepare an index of the databases

This We Know: Explore U.S. Government Data About Your Community: Collates data from various US Government databases and presents them at the community level that can be searched by zip code.

School Report Cards: NUPA’s school monitoring system that has recent school level data for more than 1.2 million schools in India.

The Bulgarian Anticorruption Portal: Media coverage of corruption stories, anti-corruption initiatives in Bulgaria and links to research on corruption from across the world.

Electronic Journal of E-Government: Publishes research on topics relevant to the design, evaluation, implementation and management of e-Government/e-Governance, e-Democracy, e-Participation and other dimension of this field of study

Not all that unique by Reetika Khera: UID has limited scope for reducing corruption, even if it works as intended; but as things stand. Development and reduction of corruption are used as a smokescreen for what is mainly a project driven by security establishment and corporate interests, argues the author.

A Unique Identity Bill by Usha Ramanathan: Elaborates Human Rights, Civil Liberty and technological criticisms advanced on the UID Project and argues that the bill introduced in the Parliament of India on UID does not address the concerns that have been raised.

Human Rights Project in the Cyberspace:

Aadhaar software locked in with

UIDAI’s not-so-‘clean’ partners and their tainted executives: Argues that one of the contractors has a long-line of ex-CIA officials, including George Tenet. Questions if surveillance information should be available to private companies, and to foreign ones at that.

Google SMS Channels: An SMS based newsletter service where subscribers can opt in to receive SMS messages and free messages can be sent by the publishers of these lists. This can be a great tool to use for those involved in monitoring of village level expenditure, etc.

The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : Unique facility, or recipe for trouble?: Article by Jean Dr

Government 2.0 Taskforce, Australia: A task force set up by Australian government to examining ways of making proactive disclosure of digitised information, to promote digital innovations in government, and promote online engagement.

Articles on the UID Project: A collection of articles that are largely critical of the Unique ID Project.

Open data catalogue: A spreadsheet containing links to websites around the world providing open government data.

Articles Questioning Aadhaar: A collection of articles that are critical of the Unique ID Project, as the very name of the website suggests.

“Mobile Vigeye” Complaint system by CVC India: A mobile application developed by the Central Vigilance Commissioner of India through which individuals can submit complaints to the commission. The application includes a facility for the user to record audio, video and also write notes in order to submit complaints. Sounds like an interesting application that could be put to imaginative use by citizens from whom bribes are demanded.

Government Records Branch of North Carolina: Contains detailed formats, guidelines and other information on public records and its management that is useful for RTI activists.

iGovernment Working Papers – University of Manchester: Working papers on information technology for the government, produced at the University of Manchester.