[epsi-coord] Russian topic - approval EC?

Sun Oct 21 13:50:10 BST 2012

Hi Daniel,

Yes, this looks very interesting. Thanks.

@Ton, could you check with the EC whether they would have any objections against organizing such topic stream?

Reg. M.

Van: epsi-coord-bounces at lists.okfn.org [mailto:epsi-coord-bounces at lists.okfn.org] Namens Daniel Dietrich
Verzonden: zondag 21 oktober 2012 13:20
Aan: ePSI team
Onderwerp: [epsi-coord] Fwd: OGP in Eastern Partnership Countries and Russia: Monitoring Methodology

Maybe a topic / groups to add to Warsaw agenda?

Daniel

Sent from brain-computer interface. 

Begin forwarded message:

From: Olena Kifenko <kifenko at ti-ukraine.org>
Date: 18 October 2012 11:12:21 GMT+02:00
To: ogp-civil-society at googlegroups.com
Subject: OGP in Eastern Partnership Countries and Russia: Monitoring Methodology
Reply-To: ogp-civil-society at googlegroups.com

Hello all,

We are Michael Runey, Policy Analyst, and Olena Kifenko, Project Coordinator, from Transparency International Ukraine.

TI is in the process of implementing the project "Towards Open Government Partnership in Eastern Partnership Countries and Russia". We are working with six states on this project (Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Russia), and our aim is to empower CSOs in those countries to promote transparency and hold governments accountable via the global OGP initiative.

The necessity of the OGP initiative in the post-Soviet field is hard to overestimate: in spite of that the Soviet Union has not existed for more than twenty years, its principals, its patterns and the drawbacks of its political system are deeply enrooted in most of its successor countries.

In the framework of the project, we conducted research in the six partner countries on the following topics:

− national OGP experience: coordinating interested parties, the content of their plans and their implementation

− searching for common ground: what do the governments expect from the process? What do donors and civil society expect?

− general agenda development for the advancement of OGP goals

Transparency International experts from the countries involved prepared analytical papers that explicity answered these questions. We held a conference on September 20-21 where countries' representatives presented their papers and discussed the OGP problems and successes of their states. You may find a presentation on the results of this meeting attached to the letter.

The next step we would like to take is to develop a methodology for monitoring the aforementioned governments’ official compliance with OGP standards, and here is where we need your help. A number of parties on this working group have already developed or implemented their own compliance-monitoring methodologies, and we want to ask if anyone would do us the favor of sharing their experience as we go about creating our own. Any help and/or advice would be greatly appreciated. 