Since the launch of the Open Government Partnership, several countries have acceded to this multilateral agreement to develop and to implement ambitious reforms to make their governments more open. Brazil, as one of the eight founding countries, has implemented a series of actions to open its government. One of these key actions is its Access to Information Law. The Brazilian law established a legal framework of guidelines for opening data from all levels of government in the country, in addition to considering internet and transparency portals key elements for the consolidation of open government. In this scenario, local governments built websites dedicated to transparency without observing the law requirements and, consequently, Open Government Data (OGD) principles. This paper shows a comprehensive assessment of transparency websites through a survey with 20 municipalities. The Brazilian law requirements are used as evaluation criteria because they somehow cover OGD principles. Our results show a gap between local transparency portals and the effective implementation of the OGD principles. This gap leads to a misconception that transparency portals are dissociated from the open government initiative, which is not true.
Even after the consolidation of the Open Government Data (OGD) movement and the existence of successful initiatives all around the globe, the dissemination of report-like documents as a primary way to information disclosure is still a concern. In this context, transparency web sites appear as distributed silos of documents with heterogeneous and often unstructured data, in which the information provided is mainly through HTML and PDF formats. Although they seem to be the preferred formats to disclose data, they lack the machine-readability feature advocated by OGD. This concern is easily addressed with the use of current OGD portals which provide a straightforward manner to fully implement public openness with data; thus, government work processes should be redesigned to consider the OGD principles from data creation. However, some time will lag until cultural transformations make data really open. This paper proposes an architecture composed of a collaborative-oriented middleware for structuring information in the "as is" format while governments are prepared to fully comply with OGD. We describe all the main components through an implementation point of view. With the likely use of this architecture, we provide society with a way to press for opening data before governments do.
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