The American institution Sunlight Foundation has launched one guide to help local governments increase citizen participation in their open data policies and improve communities through public information.
Sunlight Foundation is a non-profit organization that works for government transparency. Through this manual, still in beta, it seeks to advise public employees on their strategies opendata so that they publish the information from a strategic perspective, establishing the bases for future actions that satisfy the concrete needs of the local population.
This tactical manual requires cities to recognize the potential of public information and the importance of citizen participation in the process of openness and reuse in order to unite both aspects and make a positive impact on society as a whole. This approach is based on the idea that the experience of the citizens themselves can be very helpful in defining and implementing a strategy. opendata and local governments need to work with other community members — experts, academics, citizens, etc. — on these initiatives.
In this sense, it should be borne in mind that the efforts made to open data have as their ultimate goal not only free access to public sector information but also to get stakeholders to reuse the data productively and a return to the environment in which they occur.
With these milestones in mind, the Sunlight Foundation guide is designed to go one step further in local open data policies, overcoming regulatory and technical challenges to connect with the community and advance common goals. The strategy proposed in the manual is based on a process of commitment by public administrations, different use cases and a set of effective tactics for achieving the objectives through citizen participation.
Font: data.gob.es
