Meet.31: Tracking & Transparency

ODHK was back on the 16th September after its summer break for our 31st meetup, this month quantifying and throwing light on Open Data and transparency in Hong Kong. Our Mid-Autumn Open Data festival was an interactive affair, as we needed feedback, scrutiny and future participation in two on-going projects: Open Knowledge’s Open Data Index and accessinfo.hk. With the deadline for submissions to the 2015 Global Open Data Index ending on the 20th September, Rob Davidson gave us a quick overview of the index, the various categories we are assessed on, and what is likely to have changed this year (slides here). Anybody currently working on, or would like to contribute to our submission, this is your last chance to provide feedback for the next census. With more categories and datasets under consideration, in the year that it’s data.gov.hk portal finally launched will Hong Kong improve on it’s global ranking of 59th? Helping provide useful scrutiny and pressure on the government to keep improving in their access to “public sector information”, watch this space to see the results. Many other groups around the world will be having events around the census, so check out the handy event guide Open Knowledge have put together on the topic. Check out the portal for more, and with two days to go this is your last chance to start check and contribute to the 2015 census: http://global.census.okfn.org/

The second part of the session was taken over by Guy Freeman who presented on his now up-and-running accessinfo.hk portal. While we had a sneak preview in meet.29 on politics (see the write up), there has been some ironing out of bugs in a soft(ish) launch, and accessinfo.hk is now up to about 30 access-to-information requests. This made it a perfect time to assess how the process is working, how responsive Hong Kong government departments are to these requests (they promise a ten day turnaround), and look to what happens next. With some ideas and goals for longitudinal hacks (watch this space…), Guy gave us insight what can be done in the area of freedom of information and transparency, and how in the absence of Open Data there are things we can to do gather our own. Check out his slides here or embedded below.