The great success of Transparency Camp14 has gone beyond the borders of the United States. With over 50 participants from more than 29 countries this year, TCamp14 is now becoming a global community.
For the past three years, the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing open government, has been bringing together fellows from around the world to address common open government challenges. This year, 19 out of 300 applicants were selected to participate in TCamp14 in Washington, D.C.
Who are these open government superstars? They come from diverse backgrounds (every continent was represented), have a wide range of qualifications and a common goal of establishing a more “accountable government”.
Some are hackers, like David Cabo, director of Civio, an organization that mapped the links of major power players in Spain (with the help of Sunlight). Others are journalists, like Justin Arenstein of the African Media in South Africa. Anne-Christine Wegener has a political background, having worked for 5 years on strengthening transparency in national security and accountability in Defense for the organization Transparency International and is now writing a book about it. Mor Rubinstein has worked at the Public Knowledge Workshop and now analyzes data at the Oxford Internet Institute. And these are just a sample of the participants in TCamp.
TCamp discussions provide an opportunity for participants to share what they are doing, get feedback and develop new ideas. For example, Mathias Huter – who runs the tendermonitor.ge, which aggregates public procurement in Georgia – spoke about opening up public procurement data. Ivan Ninenko presented declarator.org, a Russian database on the assets of national officials, and led a brainstorming session on how this project could be scaled up globally. A panel of experts – including Henare Degan of the Open Australia Foundation, David Cabo of Civio and Michael Morisy of muckrock.com – developed their reflections on ways to achieve FOI (Freedom of Information), with different arrangements in different countries.
Alongside the main event, the Sunlight Foundation organised workshops for international TCamp participants, aiming to highlight the common struggles across the international community to strengthen transparency at the national level. Working to “open” our governments, we are all advocates of open data as a means to open accountability and transparency. But we must also recognise that transparency alone does not lead to change: Open data is a tool, not an end in itself. As such, discussions at TCamp focused on how intermediate goals for opening up government data can help achieve the ultimate goal of real accountability, and on whether open government activists can challenge power through public information.
See here the main conclusions of the TCamp2014 workshops:
https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/06/19/a-global-perspective-on-transparencycamp-2014/
