Two ongoing projects at LIRNEasia seek to open up government data. The first is the inclusive information societies project. The second seeks to present electoral delimitation data to stakeholders in manipulable form to facilitate informed discussion. Human Capital Research Team Leader Sujata Gamage presents the big picture in a column in FT:
Open data or more specifically Open Government Data (OGD) is a concept which is complementary to the Right to Information (RTI) concept. While RTI is reactive, legalistic, adversarial and costly, OGD is proactive, technical, collaborative and less costly in the long term. A right to information culture can be transformed into an open government culture, if civil society leaders and committed political leaders take the effort to do so.
The RTI Act of Sri Lanka has provisions for open data, but we can go further, not necessarily by legislating further provisions, but by civil society always linking OGD to RTI requests or government responding to RTI requests with OGD. The purpose of this column is to explore how.
– See more at: http://www.ft.lk/article/595421/RTI-is-good–but-open-data-is-better#sthash.brOqwofQ.dpuf
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