Corruption, transparency and a role for ICT?

Civil society’s struggle against corruption has as a major element, (alongside the enforcement of the law and structural reform of public institutions), the introduction of transparency in place of the obscurity and secrecy in which corrupt practices thrive. Various levels of corruption can be distinguished from each other. They include the wholesale corruption of politicians, governments, higher administration and the business sector, in which society is made a prey for the personal enrichment of the powerful few. At the other extreme there is the petty corruption of public officials, which may almost be seen as a substitute for proper payment for employment in the public service. This acts as an extra tax or set of fees for services, falling disproportionately on the poorer members of society and disadvantaging them in competition for scarce resources and inadequately funded services. Transparency has many elements: open government, with access to official forums, and institutions that respond to the citizen; freedom of information laws; protection of public interest disclosure (whistleblowing); a free press practising investigative journalism; and a lively civil society sector campaigning for openness of all these kinds. The poor are frequently portrayed as helpless in the face of corruption. Nevertheless, campaigning organisations in developing countries see transparency as an important component of a process of empowering the poor to shake off the burden of illegal financial demands. Various mechanisms including the use of ICTs to introduce greater transparency are being explored. ICTs are democratic media with ease of access, comparative ease of use, great data capacity and the immediacy of swift updating. The poor are, however, also the information poor with limited access to ICT. Means to overcome the difficulties of using ICTs for the benefit of the poor, introduce increased transparency into their dealings with public institutions, and thus weaken the hold of corruption, are being explored in a group of projects in developing countries in a programme managed by OneWorld International

It's not cricket: laws of the game, or guidance on ethical reflection for information professionals in Western Europe

The game of cricket is played according to a set of laws, but even more important than these is a consciousness of unwritten principles of conduct that is expected to inspire the cricketer. It is argued that the maturity of ethical guidance available to information professionals can be assessed by examining the same two elements. Some examples of codes of ethical conduct for information professionals from Western European countries are examined for suggestions as to whether they either seek to prescribe lines of conduct, or to encourage ethical reflection and well-considered decisions by individual professionals. An approach to developing systems of guidance on professional ethics based on codes of ethics, but incorporating case study material and the codes of other relevant associations, is suggested

The poverty of librarianship: national library services of anglophone Africa in the post-independence era

The poverty of librarianship: national library services of anglophone Africa in the post-independence er

Demons, disease and the library in Africa

Demons, disease and the library in Afric

The political economy of information: Malawi under Kamuzu Banda, 1964-1994

Among information professionals generally there is a kind of bright optimism about the power and potential of information. This says, in effect, 'only provide information sufficiently and that will be enough'. Students will study better, citizens will live in a more secure and happy way, businessmen will maximise the effect of their investments, and governments will plan and administer in a rational fashion. The optimism goes further, to the point of arguing that as libraries hold information, they are sources of the power that information can unleash. Bacon's dictum that 'Knowledge itself is power', is taken in a very literal sense by the promoters of libraries: as if there were few, or even no, serious obstacles to the operation of this principle.1 When forced to explain why libraries are not more obviously effective sources of power, lack of funds and indifference by government are most commonly cited. It is as if a little more money and a little more attention from those in authority would change everything. In fact, if the contention that information is power were reversed to say 'Power is information' it might better reflect reality. From this perspective, only what is generated by power relations has the status of information, and only through the exercise of power is the effect of information achieved. This draws attention to the underlying political economy of information: the ways in which power defines information, delimits it, governs its availability, pre-structures is effects. For the purposes of this essay, information is defined in a very broad way as: facts and ideas communicated. The term political economy is used in its more modern sense as: the study of the interrelation of economics, government and policy.2 Because the political economy of information can be seen in particularly stark outline in the context of developing countries, this essay concerns itself with Malawi under Kamuzu Banda

Social intelligence for developing countries: the role of grey literature

The necessity for social intelligence, broadly defined, to inform decision-making in developing countries is apparent as globalization places increasing demands on governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), parastatals, and business corporations. Yet the existing information systems of developing countries suffer from a range of problems which afflict all three main elements: documentary services (libraries and information centres), statistical services, and management information systems (including records management and computerized systems). Grey literature is vital to each of these three systems, either as the partially-processed product of the internal information generating capacity of the country itself, or in the external scanning process. Information professionals have tended to concentrate on the technical problems of acquiring, listing, indexing, retrieving and alerting potential users to documents. this largely ignores questions about the capacity and propensity of the targeted users to absorb information, however well it might be organized by information systems. An examination of the decision making process in a selected country (Malawi) and a case study of planning for technology transfer (from Kenya) are used to illustrate these problems and the role of intelligence. A range of structural and nonstructural constraints on the absorption of information is identified. The conclusion is that the problems of existing information systems can only be relieved by information professionals further processing and refining the information content of grey literature so as to present it to the decision-makers in the form of intelligence reports

Understanding cultures, and IFLA's freedom of access to information and freedom of expression (FAIFE) core activity

The sheer difficulty of entering into the minds of people from different cultures is frequently undervalued, when it is exactly the differences between modes of perception, belief, communication and behaviour that are significant. The need in information and library services for multicultural communities is often described as if it is solely for members of minority communities to be able to obtain materials in their own languages and cultural traditions. The assumption is that existing services provide all that is necessary for them to begin to understand the host community. A more considered view would stress the need for access to richly informative resources so that all members of a multicultural society can move towards a deeper understanding of each other. IFLA’s FAIFE initiative may seem to be simply a campaign against the suppression and censorship of information and communication. In fact its implications go much deeper and have a close relationship with Kay Raseroka’s IFLA Presidential theme for 2003-5 ‘Libraries for Lifelong Literacy’. True free access to information is skilled and discriminating access that enables the searcher to locate, identify and interpret information. This is access unhindered by prejudices, misconceptions and inadequate competences. FAIFE’s role in facilitating removal of restrictions, combating suppression of information, fostering rights of access and supporting the development of information competences in all communities and in the information professionals who serve them, is potentially a major contributor to the enhancement of fair and harmonious relations in multicultural communities

Historical source materials and their use

The collection represents twelve years' preoccupation with the questions of finding sources, understanding them and using them. It takes history in a broad sense to embrace sub-disciplines like history of economics, history of libraries, and the historical approach to economics itself. [Continues.

Finding the grey in the blue : transparency and disclosure in teaching

Police services have traditionally valued the ability to work without ongoing public scrutiny of their investigations and operations. They can very reasonably cite the need to avoid alerting criminals to police activities that might result in their arrest and charging with offences, the need to protect police and witness safety, and the frequent need to act swiftly and decisively without obtaining special approval from relevant authorities or endorsement from public opinion. This necessary lack of disclosure concerning many police operations has often extended into a general lack of transparency regarding police activities and expenditures, to the extent that, in many countries, the police services are regarded as unaccountable and unconcerned with how public opinion perceives them. In such a climate, police corruption and arbitrary exercise of police power flourishes. This paper addresses the creation of a policing environment radically different from this through the introduction of transparency into policing in the UK and the consequent revelation of layers of grey documentation and data. The paper makes use of official documentation and case studies of selected British police forces to show how the culture of policing is being changed. The principles of open government, scrutiny, and disclosure with a view to establishing accountability, are in the process of becoming institutionalised in the UK right across government, local government, other ‘public authorities’ and the business and nongovernmental organisation (NGO) sectors. The UK Human Rights Act 1998 sets the context, and a legal framework for this transparency is provided by the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and, to some extent, the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998. The press and civil society are consistently using these mechanisms to call those with political and economic power to account. It has become apparent, even in sectors formerly as concerned with avoiding openness as the police service, that pro-active disclosure is the best way to meet public expectations. Police services now respond as a matter of course to freedom of information requests, organise a range of meetings to provide information and answer questions (from local officers’ meetings with community groups through to major budget consultative meetings with citizens’ panels), and participate in public and semi-public enquiries into aspects of the success or failure of police programmes and operations. The case studies in this paper will explore the opinions of key players in this process and draw attention to the grey information that is becoming available as a consequence

The chain of information provision in the villages of Malawi: a rapid rural appraisal

The chain of information provision in the villages of Malawi: a rapid rural appraisa