The Transparency Reporting Toolkit: Best Practices for Reporting on U.S. Government Requests for User Information

Abstract

The Transparency Reporting Toolkit is a project by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI). Using research on the current state of transparency reporting, the project aims to identify best practices, create a template transparency report, and establish reporting guidelines. These resources will be shared publicly to foster standardization in reporting and provide companies new to reporting with an easy-to-use set of tools essential to crafting their transparency reports. Starting over two years ago, we began conducting interviews with companies about their processes for creating transparency reports in order to identify lessons that could be helpful to companies that had not yet created reports. Building off of that work, in November 2013, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, in conjunction with the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Open Technology Institute, the Global Network Initiative, and others, convened a dialogue at the University of California, Berkeley with academics, civil society, and representatives from a variety of Internet companies. That meeting was followed by an East Coast convening, hosted by OTI in July 2014, with strong civil society and academic representation. Those dialogues informed these materials.