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A guide to opening government: Help us to develop a citizen engagement chapter

Tim Hughes|

We need your help to develop a citizen engagement chapter for “The Guide to Opening Government”. 

In 2011, the Transparency and Accountability Initiative (T/AI) published “Opening Government” – a guide for civil society organisations, and governments, to support them to develop and update ambitious and targeted action plans for the Open Government Partnership. This year, T/AI is working with a number of expert organisations and participants in the Open Government Partnership to update and expand the guide into a richer online resource, which will include new topic areas and more lessons and updates from ongoing experience.

The guide will consist of a series of sections across different areas of governance, under each of which there will be a set of illustrative commitments at different levels of openness, including:

  • Initial steps for countries starting from a relatively low baseline;

  • More substantial steps for countries that have already made moderate progress;

  • Most ambitious steps for countries that are ready to put in place a really solid basis for open government.

  • Innovative steps which are being trialed by one or more countries.

One of the first new additions to the guide will be a dedicated section on citizen engagement, which T/AI asked Involve to take a lead in developing. (This is in a voluntary capacity). This is where you come in. We’ve made a start at developing a number of the illustrative commitments for this section, but citizen engagement is an extremely broad topic, and our knowledge and experience is stronger in some areas than others, so we need your help to ensure that this chapter is relevant and useful to all, and that it benefits from the full range of resources and examples available. Below you’ll find an early draft of the section in GoogleDocs, where we invite you to edit and comment on it and help to develop it further. In particular, we’d value your thoughts on the following:

  • Are the headline illustrative commitments realistic and stretching at each of the levels? If not, please suggest how they should be changed.

  • Are there any significant gaps in the illustrative commitments? Please suggest any additional commitments you feel should be included – and better yet, write it!

  • Are the recommendations clear and useful? Please suggest any alterations you feel should be made.

  • Are there particular country experiences that should be expanded on? Please suggest any good examples you are aware of (preferably linking to a write-up of the project).

  • Are there any particularly useful resources missing? If so, please point us towards them.

This draft – which is very much a work in progress – is open for comments and edits, so please contribute as you wish. You can also send any thoughts to me via: tim@involve.org.uk

This post has been republished with permission from the author and originally appeared on the Involve blog.

Filed Under: OGP News Public Participation
Open Government Partnership