| The OpenGov Hub is Moving and Expanding!
We continue to play a huge role in running and growing the OpenGov Hub in Washington, DC. Having opened the doors to the world’s first-ever open government-focused co-working space in October 2012, we’re excited to see how the community has grown, so much so that we will be moving to a larger, custom-built location at 1110 Vermont Avenue on April 1st. The new space will allow us to increase our programming around transparency and accountability issues with a new, dedicated 2,000 square foot conferencing venue. This will be in addition to a larger open plan work area that will house more than 125 full-time tenant employees. Many thanks to Christina Crawley for coordinating the community, as well as to our partners in crime at Development Gateway for their continued support.
Research: Indicators, Indicators, Indicators
Two thousand and thirteen was a busy year for our Research team as we collected the second round of our Africa Integrity Indicators (AII). These assessments of governance issues in all 54 African countries feed directly into the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, which was most recently published in October 2013. We will continue to work with the Mo Ibrahim Foundation in 2014, and are scheduled to deliver our next round of AII indicators in March 2014.
We were also pleased to see the Web Index 2013 go live in November 2013, published by our friends (and officemates in Cape Town) at the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF). Global Integrity worked with WWWF to gather much of the primary data from 81 countries used to construct the Web Index, which attempts to assess the impact of the World Wide Web in countries.
Huge thanks to our Research team in Washington DC (Hazel Feigenblatt and Johannes Tonn) and Cape Town (Dadisai Taderera and Melissa Cawthra) for all the hard work and long hours they put into getting these hugely labor-intensive jobs done. A special shout out also goes to our interns and consultants whose work along the way was invaluable. We’ll be beefing up the Research team in the coming months to handle an ever-increasing workload, so stay tuned for some new faces!
Indaba Continues to Grow From Strength to Strength
With our Indaba team having now doubled in size (it’s easy when you start at 1!), we’re excited to see how Lyle Turner and Monika Shepard take the platform ahead this year. With a number of new features and upgrades on their way, we’re happy to announce that our friends at the International Budget Partnership will be using Indaba to gather data for the 2015 Open Budget Survey. Their work aligns well with the very reason we built the platform in 2010, and we’re thrilled to count them as part of Team Indaba.
Like the Research team, our Indaba team will be growing internally in the next few months as we gear up for a major push to scale up the Indaba user base in 2014. Stay tuned.
The Open Government Partnership (OGP)
Global Integrity was deeply involved in the OGP Summit 2013 in London in November 2013. Nathaniel Heller and Abhinav Bahl participated in and chaired a number of sessions at the Summit, including one on the New Frontiers of Open Government where we presented a video we produced on the subject. We’ll remain engaged in staffing and supporting the growth of OGP in 2014.
Political Finance Transparency
This news hasn’t been shared too publicly yet, but we’re excited to (casually) announce a new initiative in collaboration with the Sunlight Foundation and the Electoral Integrity Project to gather research around the state of political finance transparency in countries around the world. This is the first important step in building an evidence base on which to develop eventual transparency norms around money in politics in countries, which we believe has been a worrying “missing link” in the transparency and accountability community’s work historically. Many more details are soon to come, but we’re excited to get this off the ground this month. |
