Context
The Transparency Program is a global innovation which has been recognized as a best practice for transparency promotion since it offers citizens the opportunity to have direct access to all public administration decisions and acts, both in a national and local authority level, through the internet, the moment the decision is issued. Starting with the law 3861 of 2010, all public administration bodies must upload and publish their decisions and acts in a single governmental website (diavgeia.gov.gr, where diavgeia equals to transparency in Greek). The published electronic document is assigned a unique identification number from the Transparency Program website, which number is a prerequisite for the decision or act to be valid.
Currently there are 3,677 public administration bodies and local authority organizations included in the Transparency Program. There are 11,262,086 published documents. This number currently increases in a rate of around 16,000 documents per day. There are 32,025 trained executives in both narrow and broad public sector, forming a critical mass of digital champions, promoting innovative actions.
Commitment Description
Promotion of transparency and accountability, through the improvement of the legal framework and the enhanced application of process transparency in public administration. This is the second phase of the project, and it is called Transparency Program II.
The main interventions needed pertain to the institutional and technological enhancement of the current (governmental) Transparency Program project:
• Compliance and uniform application of regulations regarding the institutional strengthening of the published document. This will ensure that the unique number given to each document (and not the document itself or its printed version) will be sufficient in referencing, using and handling, throughout the public sector, without the need of additional validation or signing.
• Substantial improvement of the website user interface, including additional search functionality, improved usability and enhanced accessibility.
• Addition of electronic communication channels among citizens, businesses and public administration, in order to submit comments and discuss the published documents.
• Provision of personalized content and search results.
• Improvement of open data provision mechanism. Use of data from governmental audit mechanisms. Implementation of applications for the monitoring of the administrative actions from all interested parties.
• Enrichment of the information provided by Transparency Program, using additional public sector data sources (human resources, e-procurement, income etc.). This way a wider system for information provision will be created, available to the public. A separate subsystem will be designed, addressing the need of public administration bodies to draw business intelligence reports on public administration functioning, expenses and to support decision making.
OGP Values
Access to information, Technology & innovation for transparency & accountability
Implementing bodies
Implementation: Ministry of Administrative Reform and e-Governance, Information Society SA. All bodies of public administration will co-operate in implementing the new Transparency Program.
Objectives
The new Transparency Program will provide improved functionality, allowing the citizen an easier way to access documents of interest. It will also add electronic communication channels to allow interaction with the public body publishing the document. There will also be provision for tagging documents for problems, as well as submission of comments through an electronic, well organized, channel of communication, which will augment citizen participation in decision making.
Finally, through exploitation and re-use of data from the Transparency Program, as well as the combination of this data with other public data sources, there will be further promotion of transparency and accountability.
Means for implementation
Implementation of the project “Implementation of the second phase of the Transparency Program” from Information Society SA. At the same time, the implementation of this commitment relies in the efficient deployment of this second phase to all public administration bodies.
Milestones – Timescales
• Issue of instructions and guides on the application of the new pertaining legislative framework and the new pertaining information system (October 2014).
• Complete integration and operation of public bodies in the new Transparency Program (December 2014).
• Conduction of study and gradual promotion of actions enriching the data provided from other data sources of the public sector. Target being the centralized, correct, information provision for a variety of issues – including expenditure, revenue, personnel etc. (Study June 2015, gradual implementation June 2016).
Set specific procedures with responsibilities and time restrictions for controlling troubled operations indicated by the citizens and publish the results of each inspection.
Integrate the capability to push information distribution, so that stakeholders can define the categories or subjects that are interested in, so they can be informed automatically for any additions or modifications.
Use machine readable data formats aiming at interoperability and optimize utilization based on the rule of 5 stars proposed by Tim Berners Lee (http://5stardata.info/). (In case of a table file, PDF only is not enough, but also csv should be required).
Modification of the data entry procedure by the public organisations in the website of “Diavgeia”. The classification should be done per case of the organisation, so that all the organisations cannot register the decisions in all available categories.
Clear distinction of the categories in the website of «Diavgeia» (http://et.diavgeia.gov.gr/) with the presentation of detailed guidance on the subject of each category.