OGP European Regional Meeting Tbilisi, Georgia
26 POCs on one stage!
Early last month, 26 OGP Points of Contact or POCs, (the people who serve as liaison between their government and the OGP support unitThe OGP Support Unit is a small, permanent group of staff that work closely with the Steering Committee and the Independent Reporting Mechanism to advance the goals of the Open Government Partnership....) met for a 2-day regional meeting in Tbilisi, Georgia opened by the Prime Minister. The main objective was to receive training in OGP procedures, but by many accounts the opportunity to spend time with fellow POCs was just as educational.
The program included plenaries, tutorials and a couple of work-shops. POCs traded best practices as well as experiences of lessons learnt. In the evenings they bonded over Khachapuri, Georgian wine and OGP-branded cake.
French POC Claire-Marie Foulquier-Gazagnes found the event particularly helpful because POCs, “got to know each other and learned in the process. As France is currently finishing its National Action PlanAction plans are at the core of a government’s participation in OGP. They are the product of a co-creation process in which government and civil society jointly develop commitments to open governmen..., this Summit brought into perspective our work. I was able to collect good practices for our next steps (implementation, evaluation of the National Action Plan…) from peers who had been down this road before us.”
Slovakian POC Jan Gondol felt, “the best part of the conference was networking and the ability to learn what’s going on in other countries and what their plans are. I also enjoyed the sessions where we could hear directly from OGP staff about how we can get involved in our respective countries. Georgia perhaps started an interesting tradition and set the bar very high — thank you for organizing this meeting with OGP staff as well as colleagues from the region..it was energizing!”
We look forward to continuing the conversations at the OGP Global Summit in Mexico (pre-register here!). In the meantime, click here for photos from Tbilisi.