Videos

Today, I cannot but be a fan of David Cameron, the British Prime Minister! Cameron himself called today's announcement "a land mark event in the life of this and all future governments". Today Cameron instructed his cabinet to release data about public services in Britain: schools, general practitioners practices, hospitals, courts, prisons, the transport system, etc.!

Watch his speech on YouTube about why the British government is committed to transparency and what more open data means for British citizens! Once data about public services is open, Cameron explained, people will be able to make informed choices on which services to use. They will be able to compare schools according to criteria such as exam results and truancy rates. They will be able to compare doctors with regard to customer service and health outcomes of their patients. Read more »

Reflections on a recent online debate with Dirk Niebel. How does development cooperation change in the age of digital media? This is the question Cherno Jobatey, a well known German journalist ask Dirk Niebel (German Minister for Economic Development and cooperation) and Till Behnke (co-founder of betterplace.de a German micro funding platform) in a recent online debate.

The good news is Niebel confirmed his support for transparency in development cooperation in this debate. The minister even welcomes the degree of transparency possible through the betterplace approach. "I wish, Niebel said, "that we in governmental development cooperation would be so advanced and could allow people to look into projects and see how a project has evolved so far". This would increase transparency and reduce the risk of failure, Niebel added. Read more »

Personally, I am a "true believer" of the merits and beauty of aid transparency. But often people ask me, what all this standardised, open data can be used for. In the following guest blog, Mike Tierney, director of the international relations program at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., and a principal investigator for the AidData initiative, gives one example of how data can help to analyse USA aid allocation in recent years. Read more »

If your government is receiving aid, you may want to know in detail how much money is given by the donors, for what purposes and particularly where exactly the donor-funded projects are operating. However, until now, such information is close to impossible to obtain for people not directly involved with a project. As a citizen in a development country you may be unaware of a health project in your area and you may not know the construction work on the main road is part of an aid project. This is a problem, because if people on the ground do not have information about aid projects, they cannot provide feedback about the project. Feedback, however is widely recognised as crucial to improve aid, to curb corruption, and to enhance effectiveness. One solution to this problem is geocoding - entering the exact latitude and longitude of a project into a software program that visualises the geographic position of a project on a map.

OpenAid is not yet on Twitter. We try to be present and responsive on other social networks. Why such a presence is important to the transparency agenda has been explained by Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, in a recent interview in Chile. Taking the example of how the current president of Chile is using Twitter Dorsey suggests that social networks change the way politics is done. Regular and personal updates of politicians about their daily activities and ongoing policy debates make politics much more transparent. Politicians and governments become much more approachable and human.