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Indonesia’s Perludem wins 3rd Open Government Award at OGP Summit
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The Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem) director Titi Anggraini delivers a speech after winning runner-up at the 3rd Open Government Awards as part of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Global Summit in Paris on Dec. 7.
(Courtesy/Perludem)
I
ndonesia election watchdog Perludem won the 3rd Open Government Award as the runner-up at the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Global Summit in Paris on Wednesday.
Perludem won praise for its API Pemilu platform, which centralizes election data to improve citizen engagement and streamline the election process.
Perludem, or the Association for Elections and Democracy, clinched the award among hundreds of initiatives from around the world due to its success in creating programs that have a significant impact on open data for the Indonesian public.
“I hope this award can boost our motivation to continue to provide in the best way electoral transparency and accountability in Indonesia,” Perludem director Titi Anggraini told The Jakarta Post.
The top prize went to ProZorro, which sheds light on corrupt procurement practices in Ukraine. Third-placed was the Honduran branch of the Construction Sector Transparency Initiative (CoST), which strives to make government more accountable in construction and infrastructure spending.
Four initiatives received honory mentions: Malawi’s Transparency Infrastructure project, Mongolia’s Check My Service project, Mexico’s Budget Transparency Portal and the Netherlands’ Open Spending portal.
Titi said the API Pemilu (the Application Programming Interface for Election) had successfully encouraged hundreds of programmers and developers to create applications to help the 190 million Indonesian voters understand the electoral system and identify legislative candidates at te district, provincial and national level.
"We have only five million election officials, who have to manage 550 thousand polling stations on more than 17 thousand islands. So, open data-generated public participation becomes necessary," she said.
(Read also: Leaders at OGP summit call for greater government openness in response to global trends)
Paul Maassen, director of civil society engagement for OGP, said that the awards celebrated civil society initiatives that are using government data to bring real benefits. These initiatives improve civic participation in public life, improve the functioning of government and create new services with social and commercial value, he added.
“Given troubling political developments around the world and a shrinking civic space, it is encouraging to see the significant progress that can be made when civil society works together with government. The initiatives carried out by these this year’s award winners can serve as models for better government - citizen cooperation around the world,” said.
OGP Chief Executive Officer, Sanjay Pradhan, believes that transparency reforms must be strengthened and reinforced by embedding citizen participation and government accountability of those reforms.
“Transparency is not just making data open, it’s using that data to bring citizens into the policy-making process and closing the feedback loop between citizen complaints and government responses," he said.
