Title of the Project: Pilot International Survey on Governmental Online Openness

Project funded: Volunteer project

Project Budget: 0 USD

Project Duration: December, 2013 – August, 2014

Coordinator Organization: Freedom of Information Foundation (Russian Federation)

Partner Organizations: Institute for Development of Freedom of Information (Georgia),
“Lawtrend” Legal Transformation Center (Republic of Belarus),
National Security Archive at George Washington University (the United States of America)

Description of the project:

In an attempt to create a worldwide measure for the openness of governments NGO representatives of Russia, Georgia, USA and Belarus organized a pilot survey on the basis of an already-completed method of grading the openness of government websites. The survey is based on measures similar to parameters (categories of information which must be published on the websites, in accordance with regulatory requirements and expertise) measured according to a set of criteria (availability, degree of completeness, degree to which it is kept up to date, ease of navigation etc).

The main coordinator organization of the initiative was Freedom of Information Foundation, based in Russia. It should be noted that since 2004 the Foundation has been conducting an audit of the websites of Russian governmental organisations. Additionally, in 2010 they launched an automated information system, Infometer, which optimizes the work of experts on evaluating websites by minimizing the possibility for error. The basis of the system is software written by experts at the Foundation with an open code, which you can adapt to any other survey method of web-content analysis, and so localize it for other countries. The survey method and the Infometer system make together an effective instrument for the assessment of the governmental openness, which has proved itself in Russia, and they wished to try it in the framework of a comparative international survey.