The Open Society Institute Information Program works to increase public access to knowledge, facilitate civil society communication, and protect civil liberties and the freedom to communicate in the digital environment. The program pays particular attention to the information needs of disadvantaged groups and people in less developed parts of the world. The program also uses new tools and techniques to empower civil society groups in their various international, national, and local efforts to promote open society.
The program has staff based in offices in Budapest, London, and New York and works with OSI programs and Soros foundations on the information aspects of issues such as public health, anticorruption, education, and human rights and justice.
The three main areas of program activity consist of promoting and developing:
Through its access to knowledge focus, the program supports five projects that work to open up and increase access to knowledge and information in poorer countries. The program’s civil society communication activities are guided by three initiatives that enhance the ability of civil society groups and networks to obtain and use information and provide these groups with software tools to meet their needs. The open information policy initiative works to protect freedom of expression in the digital environment and broaden communications access in the most disadvantaged countries through new approaches using open standards and competitive access to resources.
Recent Information Program activities include:
- supporting civil society efforts to reform global intellectual property rights rules so copyrighted materials can be more easily accessed by blind and visually impaired people;
- helping make legal information accessible and freely available online in 18 southern African countries; and
- continuing to expand the Electronic Information for Libraries project, which helps over 3,000 libraries in more than 55 countries provide information to almost 6 million users.
The program also supports projects that use emerging web-based techniques to combine disparate information sources in order to broaden access to government information and decision making in entirely new ways. In collaboration with OSI’s Human Rights and Governance Grants Program, the Information Program is working on an initiative to use human rights data more effectively for advocacy.
The program is also helping human rights groups and communications companies to develop a set of principles and code of conduct that will protect the free expression and privacy rights of people using information technology services.
