Introducing the OGP Explorer

Today OGP is launching a new tool, the OGP Explorer. The core idea behind the OGP Explorer is to give the OGP community – civil society, academics, governments, journalists – easy access to the wealth of data that OGP has collected.

It will make it much easier to answer questions like:  

• What have countries promised – and what have they delivered?

• How did the consultations go across Africa?

• Which countries have commitments on fiscal transparencyAccording to OGP’s Articles of Governance, transparency occurs when “government-held information (including on activities and decisions) is open, comprehensive, timely, freely available to the pub... More?

• How many starred commitments does Albania have?

• What happened to the UK promise on beneficial ownershipDisclosing beneficial owners — those who ultimately control or profit from a business — is essential for combating corruption, stemming illicit financial flows, and fighting tax evasion. Technical...?

The tool comes in two options and has three views.

• Option 1 has all 2,000 commitments, of which roughly half have already been assessed  by the IRM researchers. For the other half – commitments being implemented as we speak – the data is limited to the commitmentOGP commitments are promises for reform co-created by governments and civil society and submitted as part of an action plan. Commitments typically include a description of the problem, concrete action... title, details and thematic tags. The sheer amount of data makes this the slightly slower Explorer.

• Option 2 will be faster as it only contains the data on commitments and consultation processes that have been assessed by the IRM.

The OGP Explorer can be viewed in three ways:

• Graph view of IRM-assessed commitment data. This is by far the coolest view to play with because of all of the possible variations.. For example, you can make graphs on completionImplementers must follow through on their commitments for them to achieve impact. For each commitment, OGP’s Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) evaluates the degree to which the activities outlin... or relevanceAccording to the OGP Articles of Governance, OGP commitments should include a clear open government lens. Specifically, they should advance at least one of the OGP values: transparency, citizen partic..., select grand challenges, values or tags you are interested in, select countries or regions and even pick a sorting option. Moving your mouse over the bar chart will give you detailed statistics. The graph will change instantly when you change any of your chosen options.

• Table view of the process dataset. This will give you details on how countries performed on their OGP process. It has information on the AP development, whether countries have a permanent dialogue during implementation and how they did on their self assessment. The x and ✓in the column headings provide filter options for each of the columns. The statistics change with filtering and show as mouse-overs when you look at specific subsets of information.

• Table view of the commitment data. This is the Big Boy! All details on all commitments are here. You can explore most easily by selecting specific tags, using the search function or using the x and ✓in the column headings for filter options. You can view the commitments as a long list, by country, or opt for simply for the country statistics. This view has everything you ever wanted to know on impact, completion, relevance including which commitments are ‘starred’ and which ones are new. Each commitment is also classified with tags and on OGP values and grand challenges.

You can play endlessly with all these views, and once you are finished please feel free to  export the data.

Many thanks to our talented developer, Miska Knapek, whose previous projects include the Web Index of the World Wide Web Foundation. Thanks also to the IDRC who gave the Civil Society Engagement team a grant to make this happen.

This is an important project for OGP. Having access to all data on OGP performance will make it much easier to find, filter and analyze the data. We hope academics will use it for their research, civil society for their advocacy, and that governments will be inspired by the progress being made by their fellow OGP members.

Please note that this is only Phase 1 of the OGP Explorer project!. We already have some ideas for phase 2, but also want to invite you as users to let us know what you like, what you don’t like and what you want to see in the next version of the OGP Explorer.

Send suggestions to paul.maassen@opengovpartnership.org.