OGP’s Photo Challenge #opengovgram

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is conducting a photo contest via OGP’s Instagram account!

As more and more studies point to the significant benefits of transparency for governments, civil society, and ordinary citizens, we are asking YOU to help OGP illustrate the positive impact of open government. See below for details about how to participate:

Theme – What does open government look like?

**We hope to receive a variety of submissions, however in our experience there are two ways that “open government” can be easily captured in photos. The first is by taking a photo of an initiative that came out of an OGP National Action Plan (NAP) process. The second, which is much more difficult to define, is what results when government and civil society work together as partners to improve people’s lives (this could include service delivery projects to improve daily services such as sanitation or education, or less tangible concepts like lobbying laws, which we’ve illustrated in the past by showing government buildings). We encourage you to take a creative approach to the challenge but given the breadth of options, we ask that you add a brief explanation of how the photo you are submitting is an example of “open government.”

Participate

1. Follow OGP on Instagram @opengovpartnership.
2. Submit a photo by including the hashtag #opengovgram in your photo’s caption.
3. Please also include the hashtag #ccby to indicate intent to release submitted photos under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public (CC BY) License (see below under “Rules” for details).

While the contest’s primary platform is Instagram, we understand that not everyone has an Instagram account. You may also submit photos by emailing them jacqueline.mcgraw@opengovpartnership.org with #opengovgram in the subject line.

Submission Timeline – February 1- March 10, 2017

Prizes – The winning photo will inaugurate the launch of OGP’s new website in March and will stay on the website for one month, maybe longer; The person and/or organization submitting the photo will also be featured in OGP’s monthly newsletter and our social media outreach.

Rules – In the spirit of upholding OGP’s central value of openness, we believe that all photos submitted for this contest should be made available to our entire open government community. We therefore ask that all participants agree to release submitted photos under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public  (CC BY) License. To do this, please add the #ccby hashtag to your photo (in addition to the #opengovgram hashtag) to signal intent that the poster is the rightsholder and intends to release images under CC BY. Once the competition is over, OGP will download the images from Instagram and post them to the OGP Flickr account under a CC BY license. This means that all photos will be available to the entire community for use in brochures, publications, etc. All users will, of course, will be obliged to give proper attribution to either the photographer or the organization.

NOTE: The #opengovgram photo challenge is not sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with Instagram. By entering, entrants confirm they are 13+ years of age, release Instagram of responsibility, and agree to Instagram’s term of use.

Judging

By nature, any photo competition is going to be subjective. The five-person OGP Comms team will strive to use the following criteria:

1. Relevance to theme – while there are clearly a variety of ways to illustrate open government, given that we have to choose one winner, we will be looking for a photo that we feel most immediately identifies with open government
2. Composition/aesthetics – this is a photo we will be looking at everyday for at least one month
3. We anticipate receiving a large number of great photos and will happily feature other submissions throughout the year