2012, annual report
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
CPFE monitored the official websites of the Armenian state authorities and evaluated their level of information transparency in 2012. The monitoring was conducted with two stages: from February 15 to April 15, and from August 1 to November 1.
This monitoring is a logical continuation of the previous similar work carried out by CPFE in 2011. However, compared to the previous study, the 2012 monitoring covered much more websites. In 2011, 38 official websites were monitored. This year, that number increased to 52. All the websites are analyzed on the basis of the same methodology, described in the next section of this report.
The 52 websites were divided into three groups. The first group included the websites of 35 ministries, central governmental bodies and agencies. The second group consisted of the websites of the 10 marzes (provinces) of the country, connected through the Territorial Administration System (henceforth referred to as the marzpetarans’ websites). The third group included the websites of the RA President, the RA National Assembly, the RA Government, the RA Constitutional Court, the RA Prosecutor General’s office, as well as Yerevan Municipality and the RA Human Rights Defender’s Office.
All these websites were evaluated in accordance with the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the published information, in particular:
– the existence of the required information or the lack thereof,
– completeness of information,
– timeliness,
– accessibility (from a technical point of view).
The official websites of state bodies were monitored in accordance with 177 parameters, of which 150 were related to the content, and 27 were technical. The collected data was used in the specially developed formulas to calculate quantitative and qualitative coefficients of information, followed by the final weighted coefficient and the information transparency coefficient, which was the main indicator. The websites of state agencies were then rated in the descending order of this coefficient.
Given the comparability of the received data, the websites in the first two groups (central government agencies (ministries, government bodies and other state agencies) and marzpetarans’ websites) were rated separately. The websites in the third group were not rated at all, because their functions and, consequently, the data collected during monitoring, were not comparable.
