Transparency in the Open Government Era: Friends or Foes?

Open Government Mechanisms: A Mean To Enhance Transparency And Accountability In Governmental Activity

The OECD defines open government as ‘the transparency of government actions, the accessibility of government services and information, and the responsiveness of government to new ideas, demands, and needs’ (OECD, 2005). Together, these three building blocks are seen to support a number of benefits for government and societies: improving the evidence base for policy making, strengthening integrity, discouraging corruption, and building public trust in government (OECD, 2005).

Open Government can be a “transformative” tool in that it offers the potential to reformulate transparency as more than a “stabilizing factor.” Web 2.0 technologies level the playing field of public dialogue in unprecedented ways as they allocate communicative tools in a more egalitarian manner. The public therefore gains significantly more leverage not only concerning access to information but also interpreting and disseminating such information without recourse to conventional democratic and societal structures (Heckmann, 2011).

Figure 1 illustrates in a simplified manner how such an ideal information flow might look, with information requests (dashed arrows) leading to information provision (black arrows).

Figure 1.

Information flows in an ideal open government system (Gavelin, Burall, & Wilson, 2009)