How can we make governments more transparent and accountable? What are tried and true strategies for opening up government data? The annual OGP summit is an opportunity for the open government community to address its current issues and challenges, and discuss the way ahead. This year, the summit will be held in December in Paris, and you can have your say in shaping the agenda. Together with our friends and partners like g0v.tw, Open Contracting Partnership and Transparency International, we are involved in a couple of sessions - all of which are listed below. Your vote would count towards them happening!
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Ariel Kogan, diretor-executivo da Open Knowledge Brasil, durante o Open Knowledge Leaders Program, em Berlim (Alemanha).
No dia 17 de julho, Ariel Kogan, diretor-executivo da Open Knowledge Brasil, apresentou a Open Knowledge Brasil e o projeto Voto Legal no Open Knowledge Leaders Program (Programa para lideranças da Open Knowledge Internacional), em Berlim (Alemanha). Everton Zanella Alvarenga, Conselheiro Deliberativo da Open Knowledge Brasil, também participou. O evento aconteceu entre os dias 15 e 17 de julho e foi liderado por Rufus Pollock, fundador e presidente da Open Knowledge Internacional, e Irina Bolychevsky, especialista em dados abertos.
No encontro, especialistas e ativistas apresentaram ferramentas que ajudam a fortalecer a construção de um mundo cada vez mais aberto e justo – conhecimento, ciência, cultura, política, recursos educacionais abertos e acessíveis para todos. Além dos representantes do Brasil, participaram membros da rede internacional dos seguintes países: Itália, França, Alemanha, Áustria, Finlândia, Inglaterra, África do Sul, Canadá, Irlanda, Nova Zelândia e Rússia.
Ariel destacou a importância do Open Knowledge Leaders Program, principalmente pelos conteúdos sobre “mundo aberto” e pela interação. “O principal foi pensar com pessoas que trabalham em capítulos ou projetos relacionados à Open Knowledge (conhecimento aberto) em diversos países do mundo e em uma estratégia conjunta para avançar mais rápido nas nossas agendas comuns: pesquisas científicas abertas, dados governamentais abertos, plataformas de cultura abertas , descentralização dos processos de tomada de decisão, entre outros”, diz.
O encontro teve uma parte prática, com o desenvolvimento de um projeto e criação de metas. “Foi um encontro mão na massa. Cada participante escolheu o projeto que irá desenvolver até novembro deste ano. Eu escolhi trabalhar encima do Voto Legal”, conta.
Segundo Kogan, o feedback do público em relação ao Voto Legal foi excelente. “Os participantes acharam o projeto sensacional e ficaram muito surpresos pelo fato do Brasil ter conseguido proibir o financiamento empresarial de campanhas. A expectativa deles é grande para saber como vai ser essa primeira eleição com esse novo contexto”, detalha.
Everton destacou o encontro deles com o fundador da Open Knowledge Internacional. “Essa foi a primeira vez que Rufus e Ariel se encontraram. Tivemos uma conversa muito positiva com ele. Sentimos todo o seu entusiasmo pelo trabalho realizado pela Open Knowledge Brasil e com as perspectivas futuras .”
No final do evento, os participantes receberam as apresentações abaixo:
The most important thing for the Network team at Open Knowledge International is the community we build around data. The tools we build to achieve this are crucial as well since they allow people to make even more and better plans and projects. To continue doing this, we are restructuring a bunch of technological tools for the community use. In this case, we are moving valuable information from our old Wiki server to the Open Data Handbook.Throughout the years, our wiki has been filled with lots of knowledge, but in the last year, we have seen a decline in its ongoing updates and usage. We, therefore, decided that the best way to share and publish knowledge for our network will be the handbook.
Originally published in 2012, the Handbook has become the go-to resource for the open data community. It was written by the expert members of the open data community and has been translated into over 18 languages. Whether you want to learn about the why and how of open data or you’re working on a particular subject, the Handbook can serve as a resource for how to open data, finding use cases or a bunch of different resources that we’ve collected. However, we realised we were missing a vital part of building a community around data: Events!
To fix this, we added a section on Making Data Social. Whether it is an online event, a meeting to talk about data or showcase some work, we’ve gathered all the Open Knowledge Network learnings from past years and put them in a centralized place, guiding you step by step on how to run an event around data. As always, we welcome input and translations to other languages from anyone in the community. Just submit your pull request and we’ll look into including the submissions.
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School of Data now counts among its ranks a local group in Turkey led by Pınar Dağ, an experience Data Journalist and Journalism professor based in Istanbul. As part of their activities, they have been running numerous datajournalism trainings, attracting an important proportion of non-journalists, eager to learn about data. The article below presents a data-driven overview of these workshops.
According to the participation research of data journalism workshops carried out with all 110 participants hosted by Pınar Dağ and Sadettin Demirel, 36.4% of all participants stated that they have studied data literacy courses before the workshops, while the remaining 70 people make up the 63% that have never before studied data literacy or data analysis.
If we analyse the data obtained in the context of gender and age, there are 21 men and 17 women that expressed they have training experience regarding data analysis. However, the interesting figure comes from the younger generation. 65% of participants are between 18 and 25 ages, and they have no experience or previous training in data literacy.
These numbers indicated that even though the participants met with data analysis and data literacy by way of data journalism workshops, the participants from the 18-25 age range have a serious lack of data literacy.
The workshops contribute to spreading data journalism terminologies
Data journalism has its own terminology and vocabulary, so in order to evaluate how participants learn the main names such as data journalism, open data, open government, data portal, data visualization, we asked them whether they ascertained these terminologies thought the workshops, or from elsewhere.
More than half of the participants pointed out that they had known previously the data journalism and open data terms. On the other hand, 36 people expressed that they understand data journalism thanks to the workshops, where as 41 participants said the same for open data.
Also, a number of participants stated they know open government, data portal and data visualization terminologies by way of data journalism training. This was more than other participants that indicated they already knew. If we describe the issue with numbers, 70 of 110 participants learned about data portals with the workshops, while 53 of them for open government, and 51 of them for data visualisation stated that they have known these terms through the help of workshops.
The good news is that the number of participants in the 18 – 25 age range that learn data journalism terms thanks to the workshops, is more than twice of those who knew the terminologies previously. As a result, these statistics underline that workshops facilitate the understanding of terminology.
90 percent of participants like the data journalism workshops
99 people (90 %) of participants expressed that they liked the data journalism training. Seven people stayed indecisive and four of them said they didn’t like it. The participants appreciated not only workshops but also the instructors and contents of training and the other guests.
As the data indicated, 87.1 % of people were very pleased by the content of the workshop while 102 participants said they liked the guests. 94 of them said they appreciated the data journalism instructors. Most of participants had a positive attitude on content, instructors, and guests of workshops. There were also participants that remained indecisive, or did not appreciate some features of the data journalism training.
52.8 % of participants did not like the duration of the workshops
While 27.2% of participants, a total of 30 participants, expressed that they liked the duration and time of the workshops, 28 people, 25.4%, stayed indecisive. So 52.8% of participants, the remaining 58 people, were not pleased with the length of the workshops.
On the other hand, there was a negative perception about the infrastructure and internet network among the participants. 54.1 percentage of participants pointed out that they didn’t appreciate the internet network that was provided for data journalism activities.
Moreover, most of the participants were fine with accommodation (65.4%), transportation (74.1%) and catering services (66.3%) that were supplied during the workshops.
More than half of the participants heard about workshops via social media
The question was ‘how did you find out about workshops and where do you get workshop news and announcements?’ The participants stated that they find out and get in touch with workshops predominantly via social media (54%), instructors at universities (26.3%), e-mail (30%), website (35.4%), and friends (17.7%)
It seems especially digital communication channels which are social media and e- mail played an important role to get in touch with participants and get them informed.
53 percent of Participants stated: I can make data visualizations
More than half of the participants said that they can create data visualizations thanks to the workshops while 51% of them, a total of 57 participants, expressed that workshops informed and facilitated them to get involved with various kinds of data sources. Also, 41% of participants stated they have developed their data analysis skills and 40% of them underlined they can work with data thanks to the help of the workshops.
The last two question of the research are about participants suggest what to improve data journalism workshops and increase and spread data literacy.
87% of the participants, a total of 86 people, suggested that they need long-dated workshops that are based on generation of data journalism projects. This is the most supported advice among the other options. Other options were cooperation with journalism association, inviting international data journalists for workshops and arranging MOOC programs to increase efficiency and get in touch with more people.
The university curriculums need data literacy courses
In order to increase data literacy, 74.5% of participants indicated that the university curriculum needs more data literacy and data journalism courses. The participants suggest that these courses could add to the current education plans. Also 60.9% of them think the key is open data. If government increases sharing more sources of open data, that could improve data literacy in Turkey.
There are other suggestions too. For example, cooperation with journalists, NGOs and developers, to fund support of the government to create a data savvy generation.
Last but not least, we asked all the participants, ‘If you had the chance, would you want to attend more workshops?’ 103 of 110 participants said yes, they would.
MethodologyQuantitative method is used along with survey data gathering techniques for this research. Participants are reached via e-mail and Google form is used as a tool of the questionnaire. The population of this research is the participants of the last 10 data journalism workshops. Because of the fact that a number of participants have changed between 10 and 20 for per workshop, the exact number of participants has taken 15 for per workshops. So the research universe is 150 people. The sample size of research is calculated with 95% confidence level and a 5 % margin of error. The sample size is accepted as 109 participants.Tableau, Infogr.am and Google Charts used for data visualisationsResearch datasets: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bxz1Zy_R9wbONEMxWWJucHAwVlE Research questionnaire : https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bxz1Zy_R9wbOek14Y09QQUk2NjA
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This blog post was written by Simon Matet and Antoine Dusséaux. French version follows the English oneOpen data is sometimes considered first as a way to foster economic growth through the development of innovative services built on public data. However, beyond this economic perspective, important though it may be, access to public sector information should be seen first and foremost as an unprecedented opportunity to bridge the gap between the government and its citizens. By providing a better access to fundamental public services and promoting transparency and accountability, open data has the potential to guarantee a greater respect of fundamental human rights. In this respect, access to case-law (the law developed by judges through court decisions) could become a pioneering application of open data to improve our democratic societies. According to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), publicity of court decisions, “by making the administration of justice transparent”, is a condition for a fair trial, the guarantee of which is one of the fundamental principles of any democratic society. There is no concrete publicity without a free access for any citizen to court records. This is why the ECHR considers that the ability for any citizen to obtain copies of judgments, without the need to show a legitimate interest, “protects litigants against the administration of justice in secret” and “is also one of the means whereby confidence in the courts can be maintained”. Furthermore, according to the European Parliament, “certain aspects of (in)accessibility of Court files cause serious legal problems, and may, arguably, even violate internationally recognised fundamental human rights, such as equality of arms.”For those reasons, all over the world, diffusion of case law is a public service task. However, accessing court documents can prove a daunting task for untrained, private citizens, reporters, and NGOs. In some countries, corporations or charities have captured the market of access to judicial precedents as governments proved unable or unwilling to fulfill this key mission. For instance, an important part of English judge-made law is owned by a private charity, the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting. In others, decisions are sold by courts to private legal publishers. For example, the Administrative Office of the US Courts collects $145 million in fees to access court records, every year. As a result, citizens usually only have access to a small selection of court decisions.
However, modern communication technologies and digitization now make it possible to provide free online access to millions of public court documents.
Open legal data would guarantee the respect of fundamental rights and also increase legal certainty. Indeed not only do citizens need to know the law, in codes and statutes, they also need to understand the concrete application and interpretation of the law by courts. Therefore, a free access to court records can help litigants to prepare their trials, for instance while assessing the opportunity of a negotiation. In the 21st century, the Internet must be seen as a valuable opportunity to enhance the transparency of the judiciary and improve legal certainty.Open data of jurisprudence shows that behind the mere economic gains, access and reuse of public sector information is a fundamental instrument for extending the right to knowledge, which is a basic principle of democracy, and is a matter of human rights in the information age. The judiciary should not be left behind the ongoing digital transformation of public policies. In this domain, some countries, such as the Netherlands, have already made great efforts to provide a free access to citizens to a large amount of court decisions, while respecting litigants’ privacy, but most countries still have a long way to go. Although access to legislation is already included in the Open Data Index by Open Knowledge, it only requires all national laws and statutes to be available online, and not judge-made law. Since case law is an important source of law, especially in countries of common law tradition, it should be included in the legislation dataset in future versions of the Open Data Index.
Open data de la jurisprudence : un droit fondamental à l’heure d’internet
L’open data est souvent considéré d’abord comme un moyen de libérer de la croissance en permettant le développement de services innovants autour des données publiques. Néanmoins, au-delà de ce seul aspect économique, aussi important soit-il, la diffusion des données publiques est aussi et surtout un formidable outil pour réduire la distance entre l’État et les citoyens. L’ouverture des données publiques permet en effet de garantir un meilleur accès aux services publics et un plus grand respect des droits humains fondamentaux. Le cas de la jurisprudence est révélateur de ces enjeux démocratiques.En effet, la Cour européenne des droits de l’homme (CEDH) a rappelé que la publicité des débats judiciaires, « par la transparence qu’elle donne à l’administration de la justice », était une condition sine qua non du droit à un procès équitable dont la garantie compte parmi les principes fondamentaux de toute société démocratique. Or, il ne peut y avoir de véritable publicité des débats judiciaires sans un accès libre à la jurisprudence. C’est pourquoi la CEDH considère que la possibilité pour n’importe quel citoyen, sans qu’il ait à justifier d’un intérêt légitime, de demander une copie des décisions de justice, y compris non définitives, au greffe du tribunal (sauf cas particuliers prévus par la loi comme le huis clos) « protège les justiciables contre une justice secrète échappant au contrôle du public » et « constitue l’un des moyens de contribuer à préserver la confiance dans les cours et tribunaux ».En France, alors que selon le Conseil d’État, la diffusion de la jurisprudence « constitu[e], par nature, une mission de service public au bon accomplissement de laquelle il appartient à l’État de veiller », il est dans la pratique long et compliqué pour un citoyen d’accéder aux décisions de justice, tant les greffes des tribunaux sont surchargés. Face à ces difficultés, cette mission de service public a, de fait, été confiée à quelques acteurs privés.Ainsi, les justiciables, en particulier les moins fortunés d’entre eux, n’ont gratuitement accès qu’à 1% de la production jurisprudentielle française sur Légifrance, service public de la diffusion du droit. Le reste des décisions est parfois vendu. C’est le cas par exemple de la base exhaustive des décisions civiles des cours d’appel judiciaires détenue par la Cour de cassation.Néanmoins, les outils numériques sont désormais à même de développer et de faciliter l’accès libre des citoyens à toutes les décisions de justice. La mise à disposition en open data de la jurisprudence permettrait d’une part de garantir le respect des droits fondamentaux et d’autre part de renforcer la sécurité juridique des citoyens et des entreprises. En effet, les citoyens doivent non seulement connaître la règle de droit, mais aussi son interprétation par les tribunaux. La connaissance de la jurisprudence constitue ainsi un enjeu important car elle permet d’aider les justiciables dans la préparation de leur procès, par exemple en appréciant la possibilité d’une solution à l’amiable et négociée de leur litige.
Jusqu’à présent, la transformation numérique a surtout concerné le secteur privé. Les politiques publiques sont désormais impliquées et la justice ne doit pas passer à côté de ces évolutions. Ainsi au XXIe siècle, Internet doit être perçu comme une occasion précieuse pour accroître la transparence du pouvoir judiciaire et améliorer la sécurité juridique des justiciables.
Le Projet de loi pour une République numérique a fait avancer ce sujet au Sénat en posant le principe de la diffusion exhaustive de la production jurisprudentielle française, important progrès pour l’accès au droit. Cependant, des inquiétudes demeurent quant à son implémentation exacte. La rédaction actuelle de la loi prévoit en effet une analyse de risque systématique sur la ré-identification, charge immense pour les juridictions, alors que la CNIL s’est déjà prononcée sur l’anonymisation des décisions de justice, ce qui a permis d’ouvrir certaines bases de jurisprudence, comme cela se fait ailleurs en Europe. Il appartient désormais aux pouvoirs publics d’implémenter judicieusement cette loi en décret de sorte qu’elle soit applicable et appliquée et ne demeure pas lettre morte du fait de détails technico-légaux.L’open data juridique prouve ainsi qu’au-delà des seuls enjeux économiques, la diffusion des données publiques est un instrument essentiel pour développer le droit à la connaissance, principe fondamental de la démocratie, et garantir le respect des droits de l’homme, vus à l’aune d’internet.
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Planet Open Knowledge 
