eGovernments Foundation: “eGovernments Foundation is a not-for-profit trust founded in 2003 by Nandan Nilekani and Srikanth Nadhamuni with a goal of creating an eGovernance system to improve the functioning of City Municipalities leading to efficient delivery of services to its stakeholders…eGov products have been successfully deployed in more than 275 Municipalities across the country. These include state wide implementations in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh as well as large corporations like Corporation of Chennai, Municipal Corporation of Delhi, Bangalore Mahanagar Palike, Nagpur Municipal Corporation and Kanpur Nagar Nigam”
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Transparency Advisory Group: TAG is a group of professionals, activists, and academics with an interest in transparency and the right to information, and with the common objective of promoting transparency in governance by advising and lobbying governments and other stakeholders, especially in the South Asian region. It also conducts research and organises meetings and consultations on transparency related issues. TAG has, as members, retired and serving senior officials, information commissioners, activists and academics from South Asian countries, and from Mexico, Canada, UK, Australia, South Africa, Singapore and the USA.
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”.
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.
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 […]
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.
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.
Global Integrity: “Global Integrity 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 website contains a good review of anti-corruption movements and initiatives from around the world.