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Forum #3: "Transparenncy and access to information"

Forum #3 "Transparency and acess to information"

11/12/2020

The third and last Thematic Discussion Forum was held last December 11, under the theme “Transparency and access to information”, co-organized by the National Open Administration Network (the Network) and Transparency and Integrity (TI -PT), within the scope of the II National Action Plan for Open Administration, integrated in a programme extended to other themes and participants.

After the usual introduction about the Action Plans and the activities of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) in Portugal, the session continued with presentations by Karina Carvalho, Executive Director of TI-PT and Luís Bernardo, Guest Specialist at TI-PT, who they focused their interventions, among other topics, on the issues such as transparency in public procurement and access to information and quality of open data, as well as their governance and their social and political dimension.

This session, which was attended by about 25 participants, continued in a forum for discussion, having identified some dominant themes and launched different challenges:

 

 

Context /Theme

Challenges / Opportunities

Transparency

  • Promote and invest in the Municipal Transparency Index;
  • Provide quick access to information of quality is essential to the exercise of citizenship;
  • Ensure that the discourses of transparency and anti-corruption are not taken up by an agenda that is in itself contrary to transparency and the fight against corruption.

 

Law on Access to Environmental Administrative Information (LADA Law)

  • Establish the right of citizens to access information of an administrative and environmental nature;
  • Emphasize that obligated entities must report on how they are complying with the law;
  • Understand how public resources are being spent, how licensing is carried out, how certain political and public administration decisions are made, and on what grounds.

 

Proactivity in providing information of public interest

  • Providing, in a proactive and non-reactive manner, information of public interest, by public entities;

  • Request publication of information but also, and contradictorily, ascertain the modes of use and needs associated with that same information;

  • Promote the public register of the beneficial owner

  • Reinforce the notion that the mechanisms of open government, besides being a right, are also a transversal process of civic education where access to information and knowledge, improves the ability to intervene in the daily lives of the communities to which citizens belong .

 

Fundamental power redistribution agenda

  • Reduce the excessive focus on the technicalities of open data, at the risk of overshadowing the governance dimension of that data, which is related to the issue of open data power and policy;
  • Discuss data policy more than file formats, interoperability and back-end typifications.

 

Analysis of public procurement data and fighting against corruption
  • Encourage greater control over public procurement by the type and quality of data that is made available

  • Promote the analysis and cross-checking of data and mapping of the “legislative footprint”, such as, for example, the registration of interests of public office holders, or patrimonial declarations, or the financing of political parties;

  • Emphasize that there is no very linear relationship between an open data ecosystem and corruption prevention.

 

Open Data
  • Investing in the “social” dimension and increasing digital literacy for open data, that is, creating supply and demand dynamics;

  • Promote open data such as public data and instruments that amount to a fundamental redistribution of power;

  • To emphasize that access to data alone does not empower citizens with information, it is necessary to guarantee the quality of data and that citizens are equipped with the necessary tools to transform that information into knowledge;

  • Use of the content generated in the digitization of Public Archives;

  • Produce data that allows analysis to be carried out based on mapping corruption risks and detects non-conformities.

 

 

Please find bellow the key contents of the webinar below: