“Information technology, open data, and community involvement can accelerate and strengthen transparency and accountability in extractive industry sector. These will increase efficacy of communities’ efforts to monitor extractive industries and participate on budget allocation of extractive revenue for development”.
- Jensi Sartin, Program Manager.
Ease of access and public awareness are essential part in improving public participation in monitoring governance of extractives sector. In fact most chain of business of this sector interact and impact public, directly or indirectly. Indonesia, as co-founder Open Government Partnership (OGP) since 2011 has committed to make transparency in extractive sector as one of main goal.
This commitment was started by joining in global initiative of Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). Through this initiative Indonesia commited to open and publish company payments and government revenue from extractive industry. Indonesia has achieved “compliant” status in 2014.
Publish What You Pay Indonesia (PWYP Indonesia) supported by SEATTI program of Hivos initiated efforts to optimize use of information and communication technology in improving governance of extractive industry particularly on licensing, revenue, and budget spending. These efforts are conducted through promoting open data to ensure a publicly accessible information, improving public awareness on information freedom, use of technology and data mining to monitor extractive industries, capacity building for community monitoring on government budgeting and spending performance, and strengthening community role in policy advocacy on governance in natural resources.
Through this project we also piloting activity in Sanggau District, West Kalimantan. Collaborate with Swandiri Institute, we boost application of affordable and cost efficient “drone” technology for mapping and monitoring activities of extractive industry, as well as application of information technology for advocacy and community reporting by Dayak traditional community. The program also develop open data extractive portal aims to provide publicly available EITI Indonesia’s report in open data format and user friendly visualization of EITI data.
In general, this program is part of effort to promote use of open data movement to support policy process, to implement rights and public access of information, to avoid asymmetrical public policy, to promote development of open society, increase participation and contribution in national development. In addition,the program facilitates various application of open data such as triggering public discussion, dissemination, and sharing of lessons learn.
