Actual transparency is a matter of data and it is not only possible but also advisable
note: This article is an English translation of the original one published in the blog of transparencia internacional España. See it in Spanish there.
Transparency is undoubtedly a trend in public governance. Open government, possibly the trending topic of public governance, requires transparency and accountability as a basis for public management.
Many regions, municipalities and the central government of Spain have passed laws that support transparency and the right of access to information. Furthermore, some private standards that are even more fashionable than the laws are widely adopted by public entities.
And this is one of the current problems we have. There is a national transparency law in Spain (2013), but there is no regulation that provides some minor details such as a system of sanctions. Therefore, it is true that there is a law, but it is difficult to punish anybody until the consequences of violating the law would be defined.
However, in private standards there is a system of sanctions, the media. If your public entity appears in the last positions of the ranking, the person in charge of the entity is doomed. You will have to explain why some other entities have a higher score (some of them possibly close and managed by other political parties).
On the other hand, those entities with high scores in such classifications can sleep peacefully. They can justify everything they do because they are ‘officially’ transparent. Currently, 26 of the 110 cities analysed obtained 100% in such classifications. And more than 70 of these 110 scores are greater than 90%. Would not you be proud to be 90%? The political leaders of these cities really are.
However, it is necessary to know the limitations of such classifications. They are based on “photos”. They evaluate public entities once every two or three years, so that in the midst of these evaluations the transparency could be zero and they would maintain their score. Even fewer details are required on how the information is published.
For example, pdf is a valid format, even those in image format that can not even be searched for a single term. We will need to manually read the entire document to discover something. And, of course, there are no calculations, filters, etc. available with the published information.
In 2017, having such access to information cannot be described as transparency.
Let’s see some examples. Try to find out what is the total amount of money spent by the city of Gijón (a 100% transparent city) on small contracts. Or try to discover it based on your historical “database”. Challenging, right? Or try to find out how many contracts a company has won in the municipality of León (another 100% in transparency). What about its assets? Why all of them have 1m2 of surface and all were acquired in 1-1-1980? Is this transparency? Or, finally, try to find the 2016 annual accounts, in the transparency portal of Soria (note that we are at the end of 2017). Yes, it is another city 100% transparent.
Being just some examples, these situations describe a context where real transparency is easily deceived. This happens not only because there is a willingness to deceive transparency (it can not be ruled out), but because they are in the “old” approach to transparency. And with that approach, it’s a matter of resources. Let’s imagine that you must manually collect all the information you have in the 80 transparency indicators of some of the most popular transparency indexes. Each detail could involve hundreds or even thousands of records distributed in the different departments of the public entity. Making that data coherent, filtering privacy, security problems will demand a full team of people dedicating months of work to collect such amount of information that will be published once every two years.
Could you imagine if the required information should be published annually, quarterly, monthly or weekly? With the current approach, it is impossible. There are no resources in any city to update it. I want to believe that the information omitted in the examples is mainly due to this lack of resources.
So transparency in real time is possible? It is definitely possible and we can see some examples. However, it requires some structural changes in the way we manage data. It is no longer possible to collect the information manually. Everything (almost all) must be automated, digitized, otherwise, as described above, public institutions can not afford transparency.
That is all? Mostly yes. However, digitization requires an active data governance policy implemented throughout the institution. Data management would manage the inventory of data resources (the list of datasets that will be actively managed) and even more have to create a data dictionary (the description of the key fields) in any of those inventoried datasets. It requires having an area dedicated to the managed data (different from the responsible area that manages the IT systems). It also requires standardization of data throughout the entity. It also requires qualifying the data sets with personal data that could be affected by security issues, including the gender perspective, the age perspective, etc. Only for transparency? No way. The governance of data is a necessity in the current public administrations, and for private entities as well. The increasing amount of information requested by citizens and by other institutions and regulations obliges entities to structure their internal data management. Otherwise, it is neither affordable nor even possible.
So, in the end, transparency depends on two simple things. The political will to be transparent and the correct internal management of data of the institutions. Unfortunately, none of these is easily found these days. And in the second case it also requires experience and some resources. But it is definitely worth the effort and the results far outweigh the investment.
Dedicated to Esther Arizmendi, first president of the Council of Transparency and Good Government, who inspired us and left us her example beyond what is required.
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