Right now, one of the most active Asian countries in the Open Data arena is India, which also  
signed an  Open Government partnership with the USA  in November 2010. In January 2011 the  
Indian Congress Party announced plans for a new law to fight corruption among public servants and 
politicians.  Anti-corruption  websites  (including  ones  in  local  dialects)  like  
Indiaagainstcorruption.org, already existed, including one,  Ipaidabribe.com, that collected more  
than 3,000 people reports of graft in its first four months. 
As  it  happens  in  Asia,  even  Latin  America  is  currently  focused,  at  least  outside  Public 
Administration circles, on how to open public data to achieve actual transparency. This appears  
even from the way many projects are labeled, that is  "Civic Information"  instead of Open Data  
(which is an idea starting from data reuse) or Open Government. 
The reason is that even where good Freedom of Information laws exist in Latin America, they still  
have too little practical effects. Mexico, for example, already has a digital system to manage  
Freedom  of  Information  requests,  but  there  are  reports  of  complaints  filed  against  municipal 
officials that either have no effect at all, or aren't possible in the first place, because relevant  
information has not been updated in years, or omits key data like (in the case of budget reports)  
"descriptions of how the money was spent". 
Even with these difficulties, the Latin America Open Data/Civic Information landscape is active  
and definitely worthwhile following. The list of interesting Civic Information projects in Latin  
America include (from Sasaki's  Access to Information: Is Mexico a Model for the Rest of the  
World?: 
• Mexico 
• Mexican Farm Subsidies   - an online tool to analyze how the federal government  
allocates those subsidies 
• Compare Your School  : compares aggregate test results from any school with the  
municipal, regional, and national averages 
• Rebellion of the Sick   built for patients with chronic diseases whose expenses are not  
covered by the government subsidized health coverage. 
• Argentina: Public Spending in Bahía analyzes how public funds are used. 
• Colombia: Visible Congress monitors the actions of the Colombian congress 
• Brazil 
• Eleitor 2010  : a website to submit reports of electoral fraud during the Brazil 2010  
9/34
Copyright  2011 LEM, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. This work is released under a Creative Commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)