OGP: Overview of the civil society experience with the Open Government Partnership. The lead authored is by Dolar Vasani, who also examined the civil society experience with the OGP in 15 countries in a series of stories underwritten by the OGP civil society coordinator.
The conclusion states:
The OGP has, in many instances, facilitated the creation of a platform between government and its citizens. Here, these parties can come together and develop a National Action Plan with a common agenda of commitments and actions that will further transparency and accountability. The level of collaboration that the OGP aspires towards can only be seen as an attempt to counter the dichotomous trend of increasing openness on the one hand and increasing secrecy on the other. This process of ‘sitting down together’ has in itself been valuable and for many is something new. For government, it has been about improving and adopting new, modern standards of participatory democracy and bringing the voice and demands of the citizen to the table, often overlooked by the state, with the objective of improving the quality of service delivery. For civil society, it has been important to learn that within the state there are civil servants who are just as interested as non-government actors in promoting openness and accountability, even if much work remains to be done. There is much civil society can learn from the last 18 months about the diverse OGP experiences and the improvements necessary to maximise the outcomes of the consultation process. These lessons should enable civil society to promote the added value of open government principles.
Ultimately, civil society needs to be much more knowledgeable about the issues. It must be proactive and well organised and must become much more professional when communicating with government. ‘We cannot be weak and passive. If we sleep, the country will sleep,’ concludes Oleksii Khmara of the Ukraine.
Open Contracting: The Open Government Partnership and the World Bank Institute will hold a webinar on Open Contracting on Oct. 17 at 10:00-11:30 AM EST. Register for the webinar here.
OGP: A recording of the webinar about the Access to Information Working Group.
Funding: “Australians are so keen for information on the National Broadband Network that they’ve helped pay an expensive Freedom of Information request with crowd funding,” according to an article in the Australian.
Nepal: Freedom Forum has published two books: “Empowering Citizens through Right to Information“(A Volume of RTI Success Stories from Nepal)”and “Towards Open Government in Nepal.”
Open Data: The first of a two-part series on open data in Asia by Waltraut Ritter, a member of Opendata Hong Kong.
Open Data: What is it? A blog post by Laura James, CEO of the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Co-Founder and Director of Makespace.
Australia: John McMillan, Australian Information Commissioner, spoke about ‘Information Governance’ at the annual conference of the Records and Information Management Professionals Australasia (RIMPA) Conference, Canberra, Sept. 9, 2013.
United States: Gavin Baker of the Center for Effective Government writes about the Department of Justice assessment of agency progress in processing FOIA requests in 2013.
Civicus Enabling Environment Report: The enabling environment is defined as “a set of conditions that impact on the capacity of citizens (whether individually or in an organised fashion) to participate and engage in the civil society arena in a sustained and voluntary manner,” according to the latest report.
Oakland: The city of Oakland, Calif., announces RecordTrac, “a quick, simple way for you to submit a public records request to the City of Oakland.”
Public Participation: The Brookings Institution on Oct. 23 from 9:30-11:30 a.m. in Washington, D.C., will launch a new set of legal tools for public participation. Over the past year, the Working Group on Legal Frameworks for Public Participation has produced new tools, including a model local ordinance and model amendment to state legislation, in order to help create a more supportive, productive, and equitable environment for public participation. The Working Group has been coordinated by the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.
Argentina: Three argentine NGOs – ACIJ, Poder Ciudadano and Directorio Legislativo – and newspaper La Nación have created the first website in the country to disclose in a visual and interactive manner more than 600 assets declarations from high rank officials from all three branches of government: ministers, secretaries, MP’s and judges. More information in English.
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