"Around 100 countries have now passed Right to Information (RTI) laws, enshrining a universal right of access to information and/or documents (though not always both) in the possession of government departments and agencies, and imposing on such entities additional obligations to publish and make available specific information. We believe that there should be more awareness on the legal right to reactive disclosure through using RTI (i.e., submitting RTI requests). Furthermore, we believe RTI law can be framed to provide for proactive disclosure that explicitly addresses issues of open data (with governments disclosing raw data in machine-readable formats, and with permission for the data to be re-used) ... Right to Data should constitute an inalienable part of a country’s RTI law. In
our ODDC research, we found countries at different stages of the relationship between RTI and open data. In countries with strong RTI laws, like India,
research from The Energy and Resource Institute found energy resource data mostly unavailable, unusable where available, and, in general, of extremely poor quality. In the absence of good quality data, open data intermediaries can help strengthen the proactive regime by advocating for and helping release relevant datasets; however, embedding data publication requirements into a country’s RTI law will ensure the availability of better quality, timely, and reusable datasets. On the other hand, where RTI laws have emerged more recently, open data and RTI movements are becoming closely aligned, and involve many of the same actors,
such as in Nepal, where RTI advocates are now working to also secure open data access to budget data.
In Sierra Leone, advocacy from the Society for Democratic Initiatives (SDI) along with other groups, has led to the creation of a separate Information Commissioner for Open Data within the RTI structure, who could potentially look at making proactive disclosures open, structured and reusable. The Freedom of Information (FOI) bill being discussed in the Philippines has included open data provisions with a clause mandating the government to regularly update datasets on the data portal. This was again a result of the Open Data Task Force lobbying with the MPs to shape this provision. While the Full Disclosure Policymandates the publication of key datasets in an open format online, compliance with the policy is at the discretion of local government; embedding this requirement in a national RTI law would strengthen compliance and would strengthen open data practice ..."