Quick links: a personal Open Government Partnership round-up

[Summary: action plans, reports and guides]

I’m back in the US after a week in London, primarily for Rachel’s graduation as a Music Therapist, but which rather fortunately coincided with the Open Government Partnership Summit, and a chance to catch up with many colleagues and friends. I’m yet to digest all the sessions and notes I made well enough to complete a more analytical blog post on the OGP Summit, but as it is many OGP-related projects that have kept me from blogging here over the last month I thought I should at least link to a few of the outputs launched last week that have contributed to my bloggers block:

• The Open Data Barometer – the joint Web Foundation and Open Data Institute study of the open data landscape I’ve been working on was launched by Sir Tim Berners-Lee on Thursday.

  It’s the product of a 77-country expert survey, secondary data, and a very busy week of analysis and report writing after the data was finalised a few weeks ago – and we published both an analytical report, and accompanying datasets.I’ll be working more on the release of a qualitative dataset from the Barometer, which I hope to have ready for the Open Data in Developing Countries workshop at ICTD in Cape Town in December.

  The Barometer has already picked up some good press coverage, and I hope will contribute usefully to the debate over different approaches to open government data around the world, and how to measure progress on open data in relevant and progressive ways.

• The public draft of a paper I’ve been working on with Silvana Fumega on Incentives for adopting ICT innovation in the fight against corruption has gone online.I’ll blog more about this soon – but if this is a topic that interests you, and you have a few minutes to share your thoughts on the draft I would be very grateful.

• The UK Government published it’s Open Government Partnership National Action Plan.I’ve been involved in the civil society engagement process with the plan that Simon discusses here. Whilst in the end I did felt there were weaknesses in the engagement processes around the NAP, and there were some significant missing commitments (particularly around FOI) that meant I could not sign-up as a supporter of the final plan, it did include a commitment to releasing publicly information on the beneficial ownership of companies – a commitment that was very much a product of CSO engagement and campaigning.The plan also includes a reference to the Open Data Engagement principles that I co-drafted a few years back. More on that over here.

   

• The Open Government Guide of illustrative commitments for future OGP National Action Plans was published, including a suggest commitment on involving Children and Young People. The topic of children and young people’s participation was on the agenda at the OGP for first time this year.

• Development Initiatives launched the Joined Up Data report, a great scoping study by Neil Ashton, of how different transparency initiatives might work together on common building blocks of data standards.This is something I worked on a big previously when working with Development Initiatives, and that also has a lot of relevance to the Joined Up Philanthropy project.

Over the last few weeks I’ve definitely discovered the meaning of the term ‘action forcing moment’ – as many projects have worked up to the OGP summit as a deadline. Of course, now attention switches to the follow up – but hopefully at a pace that allows a little more time for sharing work-in-progress and reflective blogging.