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

Thu Aug 7 14:30:35 UTC 2014

dear alberto,
dear all,

the initiative is a great idea! there is a lot to do on evaluation, going
beyond the standard monitoring task run by the OGP IRM & its national
expert network
i would though join the voices (esp. Tim, Daniel) - let us try to avoid
duplication of efforts and let us build on the job done already in the
field

three ideas which i think may be added value to the independent reporting
done by the IRM network:

1. a sort of shadow reporting which could focus more on the compliance with
recommendations done by independent experts/ int.organisations (i.a. IRM
itself). unfortunately, this is beyond the scope of the IRM monitoring, at
least yet

2. delivering an OKF award "Innovative Openness" each year to country/ies
running a really insightful good practice

3. supporting national NGOs/ media actors on national-level monitoring,
advocacy, and enforcement mechanism (we should admit - key elements in the
whole story...) by providing them toolkits, platform of exchange,
collection of good and bad(!) practices, etc.

finally, exactly I would also strongly recommend to contact the IRM team
(especially, Joe Foti, IRM prog.man, can help with CC:ing)!

petra
indep.researcher
(also delivering HU country monitoring report)

On 6 August 2014 19:53, Daniel Dietrich <daniel.dietrich at okfn.org> wrote:

> 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
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > OKFN Spain Chapter
> > http://www.okfn.es
> >
> >
> >
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> > --
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> >
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> >
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>
> --
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