Robert Palmer, the Director of Partnerships and Communication at the Open Data Charter, contributes today’s guest post:

In order to tackle corruption effectively, one first needs to understand the networks that link government officials, businesses, and professional intermediaries, and then work to either dismantle these networks or at least ensure that these webs of connections are not exploited to enrich individuals and undermine good government. Fortunately, these clandestine networks often leave traces in government-held databases, such as company registers, land title deeds, asset disclosures, and other official records. That’s where open data can be helpful. When the government provides easily accessible public information, it makes it easier for government officials, journalists, and citizens to follow financial flows, understand who’s providing government services, and to spot suspect behavior. And that’s why there has been so much enthusiasm about the open data in the anticorruption community. In 2015, for example, the G20 anticorruption working group announced a common approach saying that “Open Data can help prevent, detect, investigate and reduce corruption.”

Yet what’s happening on the ground isn’t living up to this hype. Part of the reason is that, as the Web Foundation and Transparency International found in a recent study of five G20 countries, many countries have made only limited progress toward meeting international commitments on open data. But even where open data is available, relatively few organizations are actually using open data to expose and combat corruption. There are, of course, exceptions, including Global Witness, the data journalists at Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting project, and accountability groups such as BudgIT. Yet the potential for open data to help fight corruption remains largely unrealized.

To help address this shortcoming, the Open Data Charter has spent the last year pulling together a guide for how to use open data to combat corruption. The guide lists 30 types of datasets that could help expose and combat corruption if they are released in the right way, as well as key data standards to ensure consistency and quality between different countries. Of course, the underlying assumptions here are that the types of data listed in the guide can be collected and released by governments in the ways the guide advises, and that there are anticorruption actors who can process this data in ways that are helpful in exposing or preventing corruption. In order to probe these assumptions, the Open Data Charter has teamed up with the Government of Mexico to “road-test” the guide. This will include working out which of the 30 datasets in our guide the government already publishes, which further ones can be released, and how to engage potential users. We’re interested in understanding how if data is released in the right way, users such as journalists, law enforcement, and civil society can process the data and then use it to have an impact on corruption.

Our approach to this piece of work is guided by a real desire to learn what works: what’s helpful to the government and what’s helpful to external stakeholders who want to tackle corruption. We hope to be able to report on our initial findings over August. If you’re interested in learning more, please get in touch with me: robert [at] opendatacharter.org. In the spirit of transparency and collaboration, the guide itself is open to comment here.