The great success of Transparency Camp14 went beyond the borders of the USA. With over 50 participants from more than 29 countries this year, the TCamp14 is now becoming a global community.
In the last three years, the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization to enhance open government, brings together fellows from around the world to highlight the common challenges of open government. This year, 19 was selected by 300 applicants to join TampampNUMX in Washington.
Who are these superstars of open government? They come from a different background (each continent is represented), have a wide range of qualifications and a common goal of establishing a more "responsible government".
Some are hackers, like David Cabo, his director Civio, an organization that mapped the links of major power players in Spain (with the help of Sunlight). Others are journalists, like Justin Arenstein from the initiative African Media in South Africa. Anne-Christine Wegener has political origins, having worked for 5 years to strengthen transparency in the national better safety and Defense accountability in the organization Transparency International and now writes a book about it. Mor Rubinstein has worked at Public Knowledge Workshop and now analyzes data στο Oxford Internet Institute. And these are just a sample of TCamp participants.
Discussions at TCamp give participants the opportunity to share what they do, get feedback and develop new ideas. For example, Mathias Huter - who manages the platform tendermonitor.ge, which brings together public procurement in Georgia - spoke about the opening of public procurement data. Ivan Ninenko introduced it declaator.org, a database in Russia for the assets of national officials and led to a brainstorming on how this work could be expanded on a global scale. A team of experts - including Henare Degan Open Australia Foundation, David Cabo's Civio and Michael Morisy's muckrock.com - developed their concerns about ways to achieve FOI (Freedom of Information), with different arrangements in different countries.
Along with the main event, the Sunlight Foundation has organized workshops for TCamp international participants, aiming to promote joint struggles across the international community to enhance transparency at national level. Working for the 'opening up' of our governments, we are all supporters of the open data as a means of open accountability and transparency. But we also have to recognize that transparency alone does not lead to change: Open data is a tool, it is not an end in itself. Therefore, the discussions at TCamp focused on how the interim goals for opening government data can help achieve the ultimate goal of real accountability and whether open government activists can confront power through public information.
Here are the main conclusions of the TCamp2014 workshops:
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/06/19/a-global-perspective-on-transparencycamp-2014/
