“It’s my goal to share the knowledge gained from their experience with you, while learning a little about what’s going on in your country. Even if you can’t read through the whole post, please DO skip to the end and send me your answer to the question — we all stand to benefit!” Wayne Moses Burke, Executive Director of the Open Forum Foundation.
The Open Government Partnership is officially afoot with the Articles of Governance formally approved and adopted at the first annual meeting in Brasilia last month. With distance gained from the meeting, this is a good moment to take stock of where the Partnership stands and the direction it needs to go. Read more.
Allison Tilley from Open Democracy Advance Center, sent out the Civil Society Transparency Report for South Africa prepared for the OGP meeting in Brasilia and updated it onto their OGP website (and on to several places on the ODAC website). You can find the report at http://opengovpartners.org/za/transparency-in-south-africa/ or http://www.opendemocracy.org.za.
This is the real power of OpenStreetMap. It’s not just a tiled map, but is actual data that’s free to download and use for any purpose, and cheap to contribute to.
When the Ukrainian government decided to hold national consultations on the OGP plan – to fulfill the requirement for civil society input – by means of these civic councils and scheduled the meetings for right around Christmas, we realized that the government wanted to conduct pseudo-consultations and avoid any serious critique.
I thought it would be helpful to note down some thoughts on Brasilia’s meeting fast, whilst the memory is still fresh…