Building an Open Database on Politically Exposed Persons in Malaysia: A Case Study

In the third edition of the Open Data Barometer (ODB), Malaysia is placed 51st out of 92 countries and eighth among 12 countries in East Asia and the Pacific. Malaysia’s position in the ODB, just slightly above China and Vietnam, speaks to the fact that open data is fairly new to the country, which has been beleaguered recently with grand corruption cases involving key leaders in government. It was only a year ago that the chief secretary of state announced that the government of Malaysia would introduce open government principles into its bureaucracy, provide a set of open data guidelines to government agencies, and select national open data champions to pursue the proactive disclosure of information. As part of this initiative, the government has launched an open data portal which contains roughly 1000 datasets (as of May 2016).