Late June, I will be contributing to a course of the The Hague Academy for Local Governance on Integrity and Anti-Corruption efforts. My part in this course will look at the role and use of open data and transparency efforts.

How open data helps create transparency, like public procurement data, land registry and land banks data, ultimate beneficial ownership data, public spending, (farming) subsidies, politicians expenses, etc. and the role of ‘many eyes’ in such cases.
I will certainly talk about how open data can create new agency, levelling the playing field between citizens and government entities (like local budget monitoring does). Also the role of investigative journalism (like Follow the Money here in NL), especially the cross-border variety, leaks, novel research groups like Bellingcat, and crowd sourced efforts to wade through large responses made to Freedom of Information requests, mapping impact of civil war, or detecting war crimes. All examples of, let’s call it ‘Data Driven Daylight’. I probably will also need to talk a bit about data provenance and data governance, as well as how understanding the basics of technology is a prerequisite if you have a role in preventing and detecting integrity and corruption issues.

My experiences in open data, work for the World Bank, and the UNDP (for which I contributed to an anti-corruption training a few years ago), as well as my role as board member of the leading Dutch transparency NGO Open State Foundation will be the basis.