Data disclosure and transparency for accountability: A strategy and case analysis

Abstract

The current financial crisis has reinforced the need for transparency and accountability in the context of open government. As such, governments have promoted transparency initiatives by developing portals where a huge number of datasets is made available. But simply to disclose datasets in a centralized web portal might not address the variety of citizens' and other stakeholders' information seeking scenarios. To characterize such scenarios we considered the role of scientists and researchers as 'information brokers' and analysed transparency assessment literature and the way information was being searched for in those exercises. Based on this analysis, we propose an overall data disclosure strategy which contemplates several different types of information sources (other than just one centralized web portal) and lay out a set of desired characteristics for those sources. We then use the proposed strategy as a framework to assess the Portuguese panorama with respect to information disclosure, and also to practically illustrate the strategy and its components. The assessment exercise showed that the proposed strategy could indeed be used not only as an open government policy guideline, but also as an open government (transparency) assessment framework.