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

Tue Aug 12 08:00:23 UTC 2014

Morning all,

I am working with Miska Knapek, who some of you in the OKF crowd probably
know, to get a good visualization tool up - both expert and layman view -
on the IRM data (enriched with issue tags). Hard work, but slowly getting
closer. Will be ready end of September latest I hope. It really should help
us all to filter and sort the data, make comparisons of countries, see if
performance on certain issues is better than on others etc. All based on
the IRM data though, so deeper analysis on specific topics, or ambition
measured against international standards etc would be a separate exercise.

I know some of the OGP working groups are looking into commitments made on
their specific issue area. The fiscal openness working group made td
analysis
<http://fiscaltransparency.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/tmp_OGP-GIFT-FOWG-Bali-Murray-Petrie-Background-Paper726337583.pdf>
public already.

Best
Paul

On 10 August 2014 18:47, alberto abella <alberto.abella at okfn.es> wrote:

>  My initial concern was that governments feel no pressure from public
> opinion by providing non ambitious action plans to the OGP, with no
> relevant actions in them and even missing systematically their commitments.
>
> Lots of efforts have been made by the IRM, Census and other initiatives.
> We have to make easy for the public opinion to understand who is doing
> real efforts (and for journalists to write an easy headline)
>
> Any tool to visualize the real efforts  and achievements vs action plans
> in the simplest form (and a rank is just an example), will help to
> understand who is doing real efforts and to put some pressure the
> governments to meet their commitments.
>
> Alberto
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, 2014-08-06 at 16:58 +0100, Daniela Mattern wrote:
>
> @Mor:
>
>
>  +1 on syncing with the Census work.
>
>
>  There has been some suggestion around providing more background
> information around the country that is evaluated in the census, for instance
>
>
>  - existence and quality of FOIA
>
>  - existence of OGP
>
>  - existence of national Open Data Portal
>
>
>  To my mind a good place for this information would be a wiki, apart from
> this we can of course have spreadsheets for comparison between countries.
> In the census we then could have a link to a wiki page ...
>
>
>  I am happy to participate.
>
>
>  Daniela
>
>
>
>  On 6 August 2014 16:24, alberto abella <alberto.abella at okfn.es> wrote:
>
>  I think that apart from the raw databases that IRM provides Alan has
> done most of the job, to gather a summarize data about the commitments.
>
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tFdLFTvo5cHlVJ3rjM17YYMgXc6UFrPrgJsN_dgMUMc/edit#gid=1090828196
>
> Don't you think that further treatment (visualization) on these data (kind
> of rank) would be an incentive for best practice sharing between countries?
>
> I know that Tim has much more experience than me (possibly Alan and Igbal
> you too) but it seemed to me a good idea ;-D
>
> Alberto
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, 2014-08-05 at 05:49 -0400, Alan Hudson wrote:
>
> Definitely worth being in touch with Paul Massen on this. He's been giving
> some thought to ways of making the excellent IRM data more accessible and
> useful - visualisations, platforms etc.
>
>
> My post from May includes some links that people might want to explore too
> re IRM data and analysis
>
>
> http://alanhudson.info/?p=11589
>
>
> best
> alan
>
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 5:43 AM, 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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>
> --
>
>  Daniela Mattern
>
> Open Data Project Manager | skype: e1aste2000
>
>  *Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org>*
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-- 
*PAUL MAASSEN | Civil Society Coordinator *
*supporting independent engagement with the Open Government Partnership*

e-mail: maassenpaul at gmail.com | skype: maassenpaul |  phone: ++31 646 16 78
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