User:Wilktyl/Open government

Accountability in Open Government
Accountability is focused on promoting transparencies and allowing the public to understand the actions of their government. Additionally, public officials are expected to share details about how public resources are used and what their objectives are. The importance of accountability in open government can be seen by the reduction in corruption and the increase in transparency. However, it is important to note that there is transparency with and without accountability in open government. Transparency with accountability has proven to be more effective as a trustworthy relationship can be built between government agencies and people governed by them. Some governments have created portals in order to allow people to see available data and improve accountability as well as transparency. Not all data released on these portals is relevant and easily accessible. Given the criteria for valuable information, governments should look for quality, completeness, timeliness, and usability when releasing important information that shows transparency and supports accountability.

Relationship between transparency and accountability
Accountability in open government establishes the presence of transparency within governments. Accountability and transparency work to promote open government in democracies. Through organizations such as Open Government Partnership (OGP) within the United States that was established by the U.S. Department of State, there have been efforts to enhance democracies through both accountability and transparency. These efforts reach beyond the scope of North America and even into some countries in Latin America as well. Promoting open government in Latin American countries has allowed for more trust from the public, in turn reducing corruption. Latin American countries were some of the ones included in the OGP plan promoted by the United States in the Obama Administration.

Most of the relationship is established to help strengthen transparency in governments through the means of accountability. Transparency acts as the vision for open government, allowing the public to have quality access to government records and data. This open access forces governments to be more accountable as they cannot hide corruption with transparency. There can be transparency without accountability which allows the government to choose which data is of significant value to be released to the public. This does not solve the issue of lack of accountability and highlights the necessity of transparency with accountability. With both transparency and accountability, there must be regulations in place to make agencies justify why they are relinquishing certain information along with strict enforcement to ensure all transparency measures are fulfilled.

Overview
Transparency has been present in many frameworks. It holds importance in more modern discussions due to its' presence in new public management. For transparency to work, the idea goes beyond government involvement and must include trust from the public. Within transparency, there are three main aspects that make it up. First, budgetary information must be viewable by the public. Second, there must be an effective way to make and enforce laws. Lastly, society must have means of non-government organizations and a form of independent media. With transparency, there is also factors for data disclosure such as timeliness, quality, and access and visibility. As data disclosure is important with transparency, it increases public understanding of governmental practices and is the ultimate goal for open government. However, there are arguments for both sides of transparency that must be considered.

- Elaina and Raheb, I added the entire section of accountability to the existing open government Wikipedia page. There is a section that discusses transparency briefly but does not give an overview of it so I added that in as well. All of the work above is mine and I'd appreciate any feedback on it. Thanks guys.