[open-government] Public assessment of the OGP national plans

[Daniel Dietrich]

I agree with Tim here. Comparing action plans and their implementation across countries with the aim of ranking them might be misleading (as many indexes tend to be simplifying especially when they are presented via shiny visualizations).

I also think it would be much more valuable to actually try to analyze the meaning of action plans in their local context. How ambitious are they? How well defined are the actions? Are the actions actually implemented? How is the local process structured? civil society involved?  These are all question that, I am afraid, such a global comparison/ranking would fail to answer. 

Some good examples of aiming to understand OGP action plans can be found here:

https://www.globalintegrity.org/posts/ogp-action-plan-assessments/
and
http://www.opengovpartnership.org/blog/abhinav-bahl/2012/07/30/so-what%E2%80%99s-those-ogp-action-plans-anyway

I strongly recommend to connect to the people at OGP/IRM specially Paul Maassen whom I am putting in CC here.

Daniel




On 05.08.2014, at 11:43, Tim Davies <tim at timdavies.org.uk> wrote:

> Hey Alberto, Igbal
> 
> Have you see the dataset that the Open Government Partnership Independent Reporting Mechanism team are working on? 
> 
> http://www.opengovpartnership.org/independent-reporting-mechanism
> 
> They are currently working on coding up the commitments made by countries, and then sharing this data for others to analyse. Carrying out an analysis of this data might be a good first step. 
> 
> They have been tagging commitments for level of ambition, as well as theme etc.
> 
> Because of the way the OGP works (voluntary commitments by countries, supposed to be based on consultation with civil society in country), I'm not sure a general ranking is possible or desirable - as countries should be encouraged to improve their levels of ambition and their engagement with local civil society, rather than to compete against some externally defined set of important open government ideas. 
> 
> However, it might be possible to use tools like the Open Data Index to scrutinize open data commitments in particular - checking that all the datasets countries commit to publish are checked for those countries that commit to them. This sort of civil society provided evidence of meeting commitments would potentially feed well into the Independent Reporting Mechanism.
> 
> An alternative approach would be to take the commitments data, and try and create a platform to allow more public engagement with the commitments, crowdsourcing views on whether they are (a) ambitious enough; and (b) being applied and delivered on.
> 
> All the best
> 
> Tim
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 7:53 AM, Igbal Safarov <iqbal1986 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Alberto,
> 
> It is very good idea to compare and do raking between countries. Additionally, It is possible to develop "best practice" guideline based on the good experience of countries. This guideline can help the experts to meet and improve real situation.
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> 
> On 5 August 2014 04:41, alberto abella <alberto.abella at okfn.es> wrote:
> I've talked with Laura James and in the local coord list that it would be good to assess globally all the national action plans that the different countries submit to the OGP.
> 
> It is true that some assessment is done in OGP but the results are not ranked, neither clearly published. We (the coordinator of Ireland and Spain) agree that our national plans were 'quite improvable' (bullshit is another equivalent word to describe them but I want to be polite) 
> 
> We thought that because of the network of OKFN we could arrange such public assessment and make comparisons between countries.
> 
> What do you think.
> 
> Alberto 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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