A New Proactive Transparency: Open Data and Access to Information Promises and Challenges

The 'proactive transparency' framing the article centred on was the key conceptual shift the 2009 Open Government Directive and the 2011-launched Open Government Partnership had pushed: from a transparency regime structured around reactive FOIA requests, where the public got information by asking for it and waiting through the appeals process, to a transparency regime structured around routine proactive publication, where data was on the portal before anyone thought to ask.

By May 2012 the OGP had completed its first eight-month cycle and the founding-cohort countries — Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, South Africa, the UK, and the US — had each delivered initial National Action Plans. The plans were uneven in ambition and the early independent-reporting-mechanism reviews showed a familiar gap between commitment language and verifiable delivery. The proactive-transparency promise was that this gap could close: that publishing data routinely was easier to commit to than processing every individual disclosure request, and that the publication operations could be audited.

The remaining-challenges side of the framing was the part that the next decade would prove harder. Proactive data publication doesn't substitute for FOIA — agencies still hold records that aren't on portals, and the records that show up on portals are typically the ones agencies want surfaced. The conversation that began in 2012 about how to balance proactive publication with the reactive request infrastructure remains live in current Open Government Partnership cycles.