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Telematic application T-Canaria and the Canary Islands Transparency Index for the self-diagnosis and evaluation of institutional transparency

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Spain

Policy areas

Anti-corruption & anti-fraud strategiesCentral & local administrationDigitalisationGovernance

Organisation name Office of the Canary Islands Commissioner of Transparency and Access to Public Information

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Contact person: Daniel Cerdán Elcid

dcerdan@parcan.es

The concept of active transparency emerged in Spain in 2013 and means that all public entities, as well as private ones that receive public funding, must proactively publish online information about themselves and about the way they manage the public funding they receive. Moreover, 15 out of 19 autonomous communities and cities added transparency guarantor bodies, with the role of ensuring compliance with the regulations. However, this last aspect was the most challenging to achieve, due to the high number of involved entities to be evaluated (both public and private), their different legal natures and the absence of a standard assessment methodology.

The Canary Islands Transparency Index (ITCanarias) and the T-Canaria app, which supports it and allows the evaluation of transparency portals, are unique tools in the measurement of the degree of Spanish entities’ compliance with transparency law. Even more so, since no other guarantor body has similar instruments, so the Canary Islands are a pioneer in this field.

The Canary Islands Transparency Index (ITCanarias), with the T-Canaria app, is the first process of public evaluation of all public institutions’ transparency in the Canary Islands. For this reason, the time employed on the model consolidation and institutionalisation was three years, with subsequent evaluations and experiences that have allowed an annual adjustment of the ITCanarias methodology and the T-Canaria application.

However, while the evaluation model was being implemented, public entities grew more aware of their transparency obligations and established the basis for an institutional culture of transparency, which keeps expanding and is more stable every year.

Regarding the economic investment, the T-Canaria application has required an investment of less than €55,000 between the initial deployment and the three subsequent annual modifications. Its first development was part of a broader technical assistance for the creation of the electronic office and the file management system of the Office of the Transparency Commissioner. Additionally, the acquired experience has subsequently been translated into the ‘evalúa-T’ Transparency Measure, an open-source application that allows anyone to easily and intuitively evaluate the active transparency of any entity, public or private. The implementation time has been five months. This transparency measure provides the capacity to observe both the entities and the citizens, so that efficient and transparent institutions can be built, and Goal 16 of Sustainable Development can be met.

The experiences of the over 800 people who work on transparency in all the Canary Islands’ public and private institutions, are the basis of a virtuous circle that progresses and gains feedback in a continuous and bidirectional manner. This allows the improvement, year after year, of both the ITCanarias Index quality and the informative richness of more than 80% of transparency portals in the archipelago.

The methodology of the Canary Islands Transparency Index (ITCanarias) is perfectly adaptable and applicable in all autonomous communities and even in those administrations that wish to develop an evaluation system of their own transparency and their own entities. The main differences lie in the number of involved entities to be evaluated and their maps of obligations.

The model could also be adapted to the legislation of other countries that establish active advertising obligations. This adaptability is due to the methodology on which ITCanarias is based (namely MESTA – Methodology of Evaluation and Monitoring of Transparency in Public Activity), being developed with the objective of establishing a shared model with fixed homogeneous statistics for all Spain, in a way that could constitute a real ‘transparency about transparency’. However, it should be noted that the ITCanarias model, inasmuch it was tested and checked, was to improve and adjust the original theoretical model by attributing weights to the evaluation criteria.

On the other hand, even if the T-Canaria application can be adapted and launched in other autonomous communities and organisations, the Canary Islands Office of the Commissioner for Transparency is working on an open-source application based on T-Canaria – the evalúa-T transparency measure. So, not only are the guarantor bodies and the different institutions able to evaluate active transparency, but also any individual interested in doing so (journalists, students, PHD students, organisations that offer grants and subsidies, etc.).

The application also allows the addition of any public or private entity, their maps of obligations and the evaluation methodologies that are employed in each case. In this way, any person can evaluate any entity with any of the maps of obligations and methodologies included in the application.

The Canary Islands case shows that making data public and generating a ranking is a useful way to progress in the transparency field. The entities with the best results feel proud and those with the worst are encouraged to undertake a healthy competition for improvement.

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