We have a new website, consolidating our blog and our main website in one place.
http://nsrighttoknow.ca/ now points to our new site. Please refresh your browser if you still see the old site.
http://nsrighttoknow.ca/rtk-news/ points to the RTK/FOI blog.
It will be a couple days before everything works perfectly, so please bear with us.
"News has to be subsidized because society’s truth-tellers can’t be supported by what their work would fetch on the open market... Markets supply less reporting than democracies demand."
-- Clay Shirky, Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic, July 9, 2011 via The Technium, Found Quotes, 8
Almost 90 countries around the world have enacted access to information (ATI) legislation, and in many of these countries, reforms and amendments are either being considered or have been passed. However, even minor adjustments to the legal framework around ATI laws can have substantial impact on how the law is implemented and used.
While access to information laws are increasingly a key subject of studies on governance reforms, within the literature there has been less emphasis placed on the impact of amendments to ATI laws and little analysis done to understand the processes that propelled such reforms forward.
Targeted for practitioners working in governance and transparency issues and as part of its Governance Working Paper series, the World Bank Institute has recently published Amending Access to Information Legislation: Legal and Political Issues by Toby Mendel, Executive Director of Centre for Law and Democracy.
The working paper looks at the main substantive issues ATI reform attempts have targeted and what legal forms they may take. It also examines the role different actors—civil society, the media, oversight bodies, parliaments, and political leaders—can play in helping support the adoption of reforms that promote openness and defeat those that erect barriers.
Image via Wikipedia"....Civilization, put quite simply, consists in our giving ourselves, as human beings, to the effort to attain the perfecting of the human race and actualization of progress of every sort in the circumstances of humanity and of the objective world. This mental attitude, however, involves a double predisposition: firstly, we must be prepared to act affirmatively toward the world and life; secondly, we must become ethical."
- Albert Schweitzer 1923 book "The Philosophy of Civilization"
via Vikas Shah, Thought Economics, July 2011 http://thoughteconomics.blogspot.com/
 Hill Times (subscription) | Many public servants aren't standing up to political interference in access ... Hill Times (subscription) He said access to information release packages should be shown to political staff only as a courtesy so that they can prepare their communications plan. "The access to information request happens, you then present it and say, 'Here's what the request ... |
For those who missed it, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has announced it is launching an open data portal.
This is exciting news. On Monday I was interviewed about the initiative by Embassy Magazine which published the resulting article (behind their paywall) ...
But an ONS spokesperson said: 'It is unlikely that making housing associations subject to FOI would lead to a reclassification as it would not have a large impact on the level of public control.' A Communities and Local Government department ... ...
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