1. Names, bios of the staff and contact email (program, project managers, all staff involved):
It seems normal for any institution/project to provide basic information about the staff and the people in charge as well as an easy way (email) to get in touch with them.
2. Detailed annual report explaining the activities:
It seems normal that at least once a year a formal report is given explaining what happened, what has been achieved.
3. Detailed annual operational budget (easy to find and providing key info, see below):
It seems normal that at least once year a detailed budget showing how the funds are used is provided. This document has to be easy to consult.
4. Budget for staff and consultants (staff administrative costs)
It is important to know what amount and what percentage of the budget go to administrative costs, to check they are under control and don't represent an excessive part of the budget
5. Budget for travel and hospitality (including monthly update and yearly detailed list)
Travel and hospitality expenses can easily grow out of control, especially if they are not detailed and itemized in the budget, nor reported when they take place. How many useless but quite expensive far away trips and meetings take place when using the internet is much more effective and cost effective. Many groups consider travel and hospitality as obligatory perks and privileges: they can represent significant amounts if not kept under tight and public control.
6. Transparency blog providing regular detailed information about the progress of each program/project/grant:
One annual report is really very minimal while it is so easy (provided one does not relish a culture of secrecy) to post regularly via a blog about what is happening.
Each program officer, each grantee can blog that way or pay a cyberjournalist a small fee to do the work if they don't feel like it.
Considering annual budgets of $1 million or $100K, or even $10K, hiring a free-lance journalist to report for a $100 monthly fee (or even less in countries where the cost of living is very low) seems like a very small obligation to fulfill a key communication and transparency need.
7. Open selection process for grant applications (all applications made available):
Why should all applications remain secret? The myth of the "competitive grant process" that is sometimes used to enforce opacity, keeps everybody in the dark and allows for arbitrary decisions and nepotism. How come some people, groups seem to be selected much more often than all the rest?
8. Transparency requirement for grantees and sub-grantees (including the 7 first items of this scorecard):
All the transparency requirements mentioned above should apply to all the partners in the grant making process, from the donor to the grantees and sub-grantees. We are not talking about any extra heavy load but only most basic informations that are easy to provide.
9. Establishment of a benchmark scorecard (baseline) for the project, updated yearly to allow evaluation:
Without any baseline data, how can programs be monitored and assessed?
It is shocking to see many programs operating year after year without such a benchmark. That makes any evaluation quite difficult if not impossible. Could that be the reason why they don't exist?
10. Willingness to answer questions and provide information (for big institutions, appointment of an access to Information person and elaboration of a standard procedure):
Basic questions relative to the above indicators or simple operations that are part of the grant activities should be answered quickly. There should only be limited exceptions to refuse being transparent.
For big institutions, at least one person should be in charge of making sure requests for information are correctly processed and not buried by staff members unwilling to be transparent.
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