OTG OGP NAP Monitoring

DC does love its acronyms, but with so many long and complex names for things, it’s no wonder. Here’s an intro to what the above actually means:

  • OpenTheGovernment.org (OTG) is a coalition of over 80 transparency organizations here in DC. They hired us to evaluate the White House on their implementation of the commitments that they made in their…
  • National Action Plan (NAP). The plan contains 26 commitments in 18 initiatives divided into 3 challenge areas. Each of these are intended to improve governmental openness and meet the US commitments to the…
  • Open Government Partnership (OGP). The OGP is a new initiative launched at the UN General Assembly in September 2011. It currently contains 8 countries and will be adding another 43 in April 2012. Each country must meet certain criteria to join and must commit to working on improving their government in a range of areas.

So what are we doing?

In order to evaluate the US Administration on their accomplishments, we’ve set up civil society teams around each of the commitments to:

  1. meet with the internal government teams
  2. look for ways to collaborate
  3. develop appropriate metrics to measure the accomplishments
  4. perform an evaluation based on those metrics.

You can follow along on the progress of this effort at the website we’ve set up to share our progress with civil society in other countries: http://opengovpartners.org/us.

It’s a lot of cat herding, but the Administration is being responsive and the people inside government are generally great. With this plan, we see each of the commitments being more fully realized than they would without our assistance (and pressure).

Updates

7 March 2012

OpenGovPartners.org is Live!

Just took http://opengovpartners.org/ live. This site is intended for civil society around the world working on Open Government Partnership (OGP) issues to share their progress and find out how things are being done in other countries.

We set up a US version of the site at http://opengovpartners.org/us and have already received requests from a couple of other countries for sites (we’ll not talk about who they are until they get their sites populated with content and ready to take live).