Which countries provide their citizens with quick and easy ways to get current status of public projects?

Question

Governments around the world finance many "projects" , for example infrastructure(highways, railways, etc.) or public facilities(hospitals, schools, etc.)

Once such a project is announced, usually there is slow development and it is forgotten. Years later, somehow the project is completed and inaugurated. For example, Berlin's new airport was slated to open in 2012 but actually opened in 2020.

Citizens may want to get "current status" of such projects that their government promised. It is usually quite difficult to get updates on these projects.

Which countries provide their citizens with quick and easy ways to get current status of such projects? What are some example interfaces provided by these countries?

Answer 1

I really admire the US system when it comes to sharing government data - check out Data.gov or on US General Services Administration or the Performance.gov dashboards to see the treasure trove of information they share. They even provide APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to access, and even parse, the data further with your own computer programs. (Something that most countries don't bother about - easy access to the data in multiple formats is just as important as making it available to the public).

The US Freedom of Information Act (that other democracies have also started implementing) also allows ordinary citizens to access non-classified data that isn't in the public.

Another thing that I admire about the US system is that all work generated by US government officials is considered public domain (as per US federal law, but may not be pubic domain outside US). This has also resulted in the US government releasing many softwares that it developed freely to the public (and recently under open source licenses):

NASA was open-sourcing its software long before the term existed in the 1960s. Some of the fruits of that labor live on in the NASA COSMIC collection.

More recently, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau created an open source tool for finding free housing counselors near you. The Department of Education's College Scorecard can help you find the right college. And if you want to see how these projects are doing, check out the General Services Administration's government analytics platform.

As an example, check out the Federal projects on Permitting Dashboard that list the starting stages (getting permits) of any government project. Or policy goals whose timeline is publicly stated and progress updates are released to the public on Performance.gov.