elections 
• Open Congress  : a tool for political scientists to track the work and effectiveness of  
the Brazilian congress 
• Paraguay: Who Do We Choose?: lists profiles of all candidates for many public posts. 
In Brazil, the principle that "what is not confidential should be available on the Internet in the open  
data format" is already discussed and, in principle, accepted, by some departments of the Brazilian  
federal government. However, the preferred practice for now is (if there are no other obstacles) to  
only publish data that have been explicitly requested by some citizens. 
A  report  presented  in  May  2011  at  the  First  Global  Conference  on  Transparency  Research 
mentioned a couple of Open Data issues in Latin America that are worth noting, because they're  
present  even  in  Europe  and  North  America,  in  spite  of  the  different  historical  and  social 
background: 
• "Better coordination is needed between right to information campaigners and open data  
activists." 
• "If activist manage to target particular topics to add "value" to the discussion, demand for  
open data could eventually increase in the region." 
In Africa, mobile phones are much more available, and more essential than computer with Internet  
access, often bypassing the need for real desktop PCs with many applications. Therefore, from a  
purely  technical  point  of  view,  transparency,  accountability  and  efficiency  in  government  are 
quickly becoming accessible to most African citizens through mobile networks rather than through  
the "traditional" Internet. However, there are still too few public departments and procedures that  
use digital documents and procedures on a scale large enough to generate meaningful volumes of  
digital data that could be then published online. 
While we write, Kenya is laying the legal groundwork to support Open Data. Permanent Secretary  
for Information and Communications, Dr. Bitange Ndemo is reported as having been championing  
for quite some time. In practice, big challenges remain for Open Data usage in Kenya. The easiest  
one to solve is to technical, that is find skilled people that can package the data in ways that the  
public  can  consume  (even  on  mobile  phones...).  The  real  problem,  however,  is  the  fact  that 
(summarizing from Thinking About Africa's Open Data): 
There is a lot of Kenya data but it isn't accessible. The entities that hold the most public 
and infrastructure data are always government institutions. Getting information from 
them can be very hard indeed. We don't know who to go to to get the data we need, and 
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Copyright  2011 LEM, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. This work is released under a Creative Commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)