Open Expenditures: Promoting the transparency of public

Dołączył: 09 Mar 2024 Posty: 1

Brazil has 5,570 municipalities of various sizes, structures, cultures and economies. To advance the public budget transparency agenda in all these places, it is necessary to develop an accessible, intuitive and flexible methodology. In this sense, the Gastos Abertos project, an initiative of Open Knowledge Brazil and Appcívico, seeks to promote education on public budget transparency, expanding the use of already existing legal mechanisms and making active transparency a reality in Brazilian municipalities.

At a global level, Open Knowledge has already developed various tools that impact the understanding and facilitate the management of public Industry Email List budget data. One of them is CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network), a web application used by 146 open data portals spread across all continents. This open source platform enables data maintenance, management and dissemination and has a community of contributors. So, it is evident that the challenges are not only technological, but mainly cultural.

For this reason, the main focus of Gastos Abertos is the work of “Community Builder” and the training necessary to mobilize interested citizens and stimulate participation. Transparency of public budgets. In this way, through Expenses Abertos, we developed a leadership training methodology that has different stages or “missions” organized with game dynamics. Next, we tell you what it consists of:

1 Mission 1: Initial mapping to evaluate the state of public budget transparency. First of all, a mapping of the existence and quality of the transparency portals of their respective municipalities must be carried out. Then, at the beginning of the game, a dense learning phase is presented, since, to evaluate the transparency portal of your municipality, it is necessary to know: open formats and closed formats, granularity of data, Law of Access to Information regarding the opening of budget data, contractual management and the bidding process.

In our first cycle of the initiative, 78 leaders completed this first mission. We verified that there is a transparency portal in all the municipalities evaluated. However, many times these portals are not complete, for example: 32% of the portals do not make available the contracts signed by the prefecture; 19% of the portals do not have disclosure of tenders; and 38% do not allow monitoring of the bidding process. 2 Mission 2: Search for information In the second mission, leaders must verify the existence of a channel for public information requests and check the time and quality of the prefecture's response to the request.

In our work, each of the leaders was tasked with formalizing an access to information request, requesting the missing data on the transparency portal. To promote the success of this stage, we offered training on how to write a good access to information request. We organized one with our legal mentor Flávio Marques Prol and also prepared a guide on how to make a good access to information request . Furthermore, in partnership with Flávio, we developed a webinar and a request generation system for access to information – from this tool it was possible to answer more detailed questions in relation to the data made available on the transparency portal and share a template for the access to information request – ready to be submitted with the request for the missing data.

Mission 3: Generation of alliances In the third mission, leaders go through the most challenging process of the Expenses Abertos dynamic: seeking the signature of the prefect or a member of the secretariat of their respective city for the Expenses Abertos Commitment Letter . This phase was designed to generate an interaction between the organization that promotes the openness and use of budget information with the local authority, in this case the Municipal Prefecture. By doing so, the commitment to transparency and accountability is reinforced, in addition to disseminating the project in the cities and stimulating new citizen participation.

To support the leaders of this mission, we held two webinars. One of them addressed the general aspects of mission 3 and the other explained the premises of the Open Expense Commitment Letter . As a result of this mission, Balneario Camboriú (SC) was the first city in Brazil – and the only one at the moment – to sign the Open Spending Commitment Letter and to commit to public budget transparency . 4 Mission 4: Process evaluation In the fourth and last mission, the results obtained throughout the process must be verified, evaluated and validated. In our case, we verified three main points of this day: Guaxi will coordinate the quest process, assisting new leaders in explaining and concluding challenges and presenting new quests. It also shows indicators on the information process and helps local leaders in formulating access to information requests.

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