A few weeks ago, our colleagues at the World Bank Institute held a highly informal and very motivating discussion on opening up contracts in fragile states. As many other similar conversations, this event also turned into an animated debate on the role of technology and why talking about the Internet instead of discussing ways to influence decision-making.

Without repeating all the arguments already stated by others, we intend to add a couple, hopefully constructive points to the debate around the effectiveness of technology in solving different kinds of complex problems. Most of our thoughts reflect the questions raised at the WBI event and other ongoing discussions.

Real change requires a healthy transparency ecosystem where all the bits are equally important. As a basis, we do need complete and quality government data that is released in a timely and appropriate manner in order to be able to make further conclusions to our societies and political systems. We also need developers, coders and hackers who love playing around information bits and are thrilled to turn datasets into easily searchable websites and engaging applications. But we need good investigative journalists too who can find real stories behind the facts, researchers and think tanks who make relevant conclusions to our societies, great advocates who know how to interact with government officers and reform-minded philanthropists who dare to invest in riskier projects. None of these exist without the other and none of them will bring about meaningful change alone. Furthermore, the ongoing debate on the relevance of technology weighed against the importance of advocacy seems to create a catch 22 situation: whenever people start questioning the importance of technology, they indeed end up exclusively talking about it, instead of trying to find specific ways to involve citizens or best practices to advocate for policy reforms.

There is no such thing as relevant or irrelevant data. There may be certain priorities within specific cultural, historical and political contexts and we surely have a handful of bad examples from the OGP where countries try to get away with ridiculously vague commitments but that does not mean we should (or could!) decide which government datasets are more/less relevant than the others. Rather, the relevance or priority of datasets will be dependent on the context: who is asking the question, the problems the government is having, what kind of initiative is being created, whether there is a political element to the question at hand, etc. It is also important to note that a healthy transparency ecosystem does not require strict priorities but strong actors in all fields and issue areas, and a culture of enhanced collaboration between these actors. A green NGO will most probably work with environmental information, academics may be in the best position to discuss ways of liberating research data and anti-corruption organizations tend to focus on party and campaign finance or lobbyist disclosure information.

Change may come painfully slow. The current hype around technology and the seemingly conflicting arguments on either the potential or the impotence of transparency reflect our desire to make a change - immediately. And though many of us in the US and abroad are reasonably tired of and outraged by the hypocritical slowness of our governments, we have to understand and accept the fact that even if technology improves in a rapid manner, transforming fundamentals of politics and public administration simply does not happen overnight. Sometimes we even need a whole generation shift among our leaders to experience real change. Expecting that every single hackathon will deliver a final solution to a crucial social problem or hoping that better disclosure norms for instance in contracting processes will immediately cease corruption will result in a frustration that either cuts our efforts short or creates a vicious circle of questioning legitimacy again and again. Neither helps the cause.

Citizens as a homogenous group may not be the target group of all open government projects. When talking about citizen engagement in technology and transparency-related projects, many actors in the field tend to forget about the intermediary role media and other civil society organizations play in translating facts into stories/conclusions/policy reforms and keep thinking of citizens as their sole target group. Involving citizens in political processes is by all means the ultimate goal. But again: such a goal can only be achieved in a healthy ecosystem of strong mediators who translate the information. Furthermore, when designing open government projects, we have to acknowledge that there are different levels of possible interaction and while participatory budgeting may engage a critical mass of taxpayers, procurement monitoring is just never going to attract ordinary citizens the way it attracts companies or procurement experts. It surely does not mean that any of these efforts are more important than the others but that we have to remain realistic when defining our target groups and strategies associated with our open government projects. And since technology indeed engages more people than traditional advocacy, instead of idealising or degrading it, we should embrace its potential to engage people who otherwise would never be interested in politics, decision-making and more abstract dimensions of democracy.

Yesterday, the Obama administration made a few new announcements about its vision for technology in government.

Between the Presidential Memorandum, the Digital Government Strategy (html, pdf), and the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program, they covered a lot of ground. By far, though, the most interesting parts to me were about creating the "new default" for open data:

1. Make Open Data, Content, and Web APIs the New Default

...Under a presumption of openness, agencies must evaluate the
information contained within these systems for release
to other agencies and the public, publish it in a timely
manner, make it easily accessible for external use as
applicable, and post it at agency.gov/developer in a
machine-readable format

At first blush, this seems very exciting -- we have long requested that agencies make better decisions about what information gets released and what doesn't. I'm concerned, however, that this new requirement looks the same as many, many requirements that have come before it.

The Paperwork Reduction Act, first passed in 1980...

(d) With respect to information dissemination, each agency shall— (1) ensure that the public has timely and equitable access to the agency’s public information

...requires as much, through requirements both met and ignored.

OMB Circular A-130, first written in 1985:

Because the public disclosure of government information is essential to the operation of a democracy, the management of Federal information resources should protect the public's right of access to government information... Agencies must plan in an integrated manner for managing information throughout its life cycle. Agencies will: (a) Consider, at each stage of the information life cycle, the effects of decisions and actions on other stages of the life cycle, particularly those concerning information dissemination;

The Presidential memo, from day one of the administration:

Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.

The Open Government Directive requires agencies to create...

A strategic action plan for transparency that (1) inventories agency high-value information currently available for download; (2) fosters the public’s use of this information to increase public knowledge and promote public scrutiny of agency services; and (3) identifies high value information not yet available and establishes a reasonable timeline for publication online in open formats with specific target dates

...which most agencies failed to do, with a few notable exceptions.

The Presidential Memo on Regulatory Compliance Data requires plans and a review of data:

First, agencies with broad regulatory compliance and administrative enforcement responsibilities, within 120 days of this memorandum, to the extent feasible and permitted by law, shall develop plans to make public information concerning their regulatory compliance and enforcement activities accessible, downloadable, and searchable online.

...but only a handful of agencies ever released those plans, and of those, only DOT attempted to be comprehensive in their review.

The US Open Government Partnership National Action Plan:

Provide Enforcement and Compliance Data Online. Agencies will continue to develop plans for providing greater transparency about their regulatory compliance and enforcement activities, and look for new ways to make that information accessible to the public.

There are probably many more similar requirements. One policy after another has required that government officials make better decisions about what gets released to the public, asserting that openness is the new presumption (like the Holder DOJ memo on FOIA, as yet another example). What's strange, though, is that the new strategy suggests that open data is the "new" default. Did the other policies not work? And if not, how will this new technology strategy achieve what the other policies haven't?

Maybe the new strategy will create processes and incentives that create better decisions out of government officials. We certainly hope so. But when reading through yesterday's announcements, it's hard not to have some doubt over how much new information will be released. Ultimately, these initiatives succeed or fail based on whether new things become knowable, and whether new things get done. But throughout four years of the Obama administration, we've learned a lot about the limitations of aspirational policy declarations. What's to separate this new policy from what's come before it?

Now, there are certainly good things within these plans. Clearly much of the way citizens interact with government will take place through mobile platforms, and nothing but good can come of placing fellows throughout government to help design new initiatives.

But for each exciting new development, there's something that looks to me like a retreat.

The fellows program brings new perspectives into government, but defines its open data goals narrowly:

This program aims to stimulate a rising tide of entrepreneurship that uses data from governmental and non-governmental sources to create tools that can help Americans better navigate their world, such as by finding the right health care provider, identifying the college that provides the best value for their money, saving money on electricity bills through smarter energy shopping, keeping their families safe by knowing which products have been recalled, and much more.

That's great, everyone wants entrepreneurship. But why limit an open data initiative to that category of information? The first two years of the Obama administration's transparency work were devoted to empowering citizens, while this initiative is about empowering consumers and entrepreneurs. Again, those are both worthy goals, but why has the technology agenda's scope narrowed?

In short, it's because the administration has defined comfortable ways of engaging with accountability questions. The White House (admirably) created Ethics.gov, but other than that, Obama the reformer has largely gone quiet ever since the 2010 defeat of the DISCLOSE Act. The affirmative ethics agenda turned into defensiveness. The transformation of poltical power through technology that characterized the Change.gov agenda from 2009 doesn't show up at all in the government-wide technology agenda in 2012.

Maybe it's unfair to respond to a new technology plan with issues that are probably outside the control of both the CTO and CIO behind the strategy. But the administration that planned for regulatory agencies to "conduct the significant business of the agency in public" has removed regulatory documents from public view at the peak of their relevance, and the administration that promised to "shine a light on pork barrel spending" still hasn't enforced a Bush era executive order requiring earmark request transparency.

Of course, we never expected a new technology strategy to give any real help to these issues; former CIO Vivek Kundra's 25 point plan was about managing IT investments, and was largely agnostic towards real information policy concerns.

But we should judge policies, especially Presidential policies, on both what they do and what they don't do. This new strategic plan does a lot, but it also leaves some very telling omissions.

This week, the Open Government Partnership (OGP) will convene its first annual meeting in Brasilia. The OGP is a coalition of member countries that have made documented commitments to making their government more open and accountable (you can find a list of country specific commitments here). The OGP has five grand challenges, one of which is increased corporate accountability. This is a subject near and dear to our heart, particularly as it relates to those corporations that have interactions with the government, such as with contracting or campaign finance. Today, OpenCorporates releases a new report that surveys the availability of open corporate data in the participating OGP countries (including the U.S.). The results? The Czech Republic and Albania are killing us!

The report ranked the OGP countries in four main areas: Basic online data availability at no cost or registration, an open license, bulk data availability, and the depth of data available. In the U.S., this data is generally available at the state level. It's surprising how many states don't think this information should be publicly available at no cost. If you're asking why this data should be available, check out this World Bank report on how the ability of corporate structures to shield ownership facilitates corruption. Or read this news story on how one family used multiple shell corporations to get around the political giving limits. You could also peruse this report by members of the Federal Reserve Board on how opaque corporate hierarchies make it very difficult to evaluate the financial risk in a global market. Obscuring corporate relationships and ownership structures make it even harder to predict the kind of domino effect we witnessed in the recent financial crisis.

It's great the OGP picked increased corporate accountability as one of its five challenges, but as you can see from the graphic below, most OGP countries aren't living up to the ideal. The U.S. is being surpassed by the Czech Republic, Albania and the Slovak Republic (and in a couple of months, the UK). No offense is meant to those countries, but the longstanding democratic government of the U.S. should be in a better position than this.

One step we can take in the U.S. is to start collecting more corporate ownership information than we currently do. Right now there's a bill in both the House and Senate that would take concrete steps towards solving this problem. Write or call your representatives and ask them to support S.1483 or H.R.3416.

Disclosure: Kaitlin is on the OpenCorporates advisory board

This is the third and last part of Matt's post on the Open Government Partnership

National governments seeking to become open should look not only to smart NGOs, software developers, students and journalists, but to town councils, which generally tend to face more direct pressure for accountability on a daily basis in their communities.

Although varying conditions may dictate different strategies, the ultimate destination is a common one. Any government that wants to call itself open must provide free and accessible public information on taxation, draft and adopted budgets, and actual year-end spending including contract awards. There should be full and open disclosure on government bidding processes, job openings, salaries and benefits, court proceedings and legislation prior to and after passage. Also vital are sharing of key data on economic performance, public health conditions, and fair metrics of student and teacher performance at public schools. A lynchpin of open government is a trustworthy and transparent elections process including impartial and open adjudication of fraud allegations.

A next layer of transparency would include wide promotion of census data, and adopted laws which serve to daylight public records, lobbying, campaign contributions, and ethics and accountability oversight in government.

Girding the whole disclosure framework should be government reports and data created in machine-readable formats, and liberally posted online.

As OGP, its member nations and their domestic partners work to bring ambitious open government plans to life, here are a few more things they should bear in mind.

• Crowd-sourced sites which accent the need for government response also require a formal and public adoption by government. Nobody wants to report into an abyss. "Open 311" sites which allow citizens to report and see resolution of cracked sidewalks, broken streetlights, gaping potholes, broken park equipment can be a huge force for building trust and engaging publics - if reports actually prompt action. To get to this point requires real collaboration between site developers, officialdom, and constituents.

• Most people aren't tech geeks, even in advanced economies. Although software developers are crucial partners, keep the needs of everyday constituents foremost. Throwing 400 government data sets online is not an open government policy. Track what developers do, if much of anything, with all those data sets once posted. How many actually get rendered into browser-friendly Web sites and easy mobile apps? How widely are the sites and apps used? And make sure to look beyond the open data craze no matter how well outcomes of data portals are tracked. As Nathaniel Heller of Global Integrity, an OGP partner, blogs:

  Instead of fetishizing open data portals for the sake of having open data portals, I'd rather see governments incorporating open data as a way to address more fundamental structural challenges around extractives (through maps and budget data), the political process (through real-time disclosure of campaign contributions), or budget priorities (through online publication of budget line-items).

• Another thing: impenetrable gov-speak has got to go. Written government communications including laws, regulations, audits, reports, contracts and more should be in plain language only.

• The trend toward more and more data visualizations, audio and video is good if it's user-focused. Videos of full meetings of legislative or regulatory bodies need should be indexed by main topics and include keyword-searchable transcripts. Prototypes are already emerging.

• Reveal and revile censorship and intimidation of media and activists, first by highlighting the oversight work of organizations such as Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and second, through vigorous state prosecution of those who seek to censor, threaten or otherwise intimidate reporters and activists. Hello, Mexico?

• Reflecting recommendations in a landmark report issued by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission earlier this year, more foundations and philanthropists should support independent non-profit media doing valuable work on transparency, particularly "last mile delivery" of the fruits of open government.

It's a time of challenge, and of possibility. Every major development right now on the global political scene - including the financial meltdown in Europe, economic troubles in the U.S., the wave of pro-liberty uprisings in the Arab world, even the little noticed efforts of locals and NGOs to shepherd the tiny West African nation of Guineau-Bissau away from the despotic rule of drug profiteer-kleptocrats - intersects closely with the need for open, honest and accountable government. Because the need is so deep and broad, the Open Government Partnership represents an important attempt to bring a multilateral and official hue to the challenge.

But public officials who aspire to wring utility more than huzzahs out of open government initiatives would do well to heed the musty adage,"'dance with them that brought you," popular among the old-time ward-heelers of New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago.

It's just that the partners and the venue for the dance look a whole lot different these days.

In this second  in a three-part series, guest blogger Matt Rosenberg continues to reflect on the Open Government Partnership

Egypt, for instance, could hardly be expected to commit now to a formal national plan for open government nor is it yet part of OGP. But as the country sorts out its post-Mubarak political future it's already evident that crowd-sourced data, literally from the street, are being used to push for social and government reforms. Women in Cairo are using a site called Harass Map, built on the open-source platform Ushahidi, to document widespread and traditionally tolerated sexual harassment. Reports can be texted, e-mailed or tweeted, to be integrated into the growing and mapped compendium of uncivil behavior. Categories include rape-sexual assault, indecent exposure, stalking or following, touching, sexual invites,  phone calls, comments, catcalls, and ogling.

India is not a member of the Open Government Partnership and given that government corruption is still considered a notorious scourge there, any state-stamped transparency scheme would be met with skepticism. Yet that hasn't prevented a vibrant community of reformers from adapting new tools to an old concern. The transparency site ipaidabribe.com collects firsthand reports on the intimidation by government officials of businesses and citizens through informally-mandated payoffs, and offers related data analytics. It was created by Janaagraha, a Bangalore-based non-profit focused on quality of life and citizenship in urban India. In the Central Gondwana region of India, tribal members report on and learn about problems that citizens encounter with government, through a mobile phone voice portal called CGNet Swara. It has a Web hub and journalists to vet and edit reports. The service's impacts include seeding mainstream overage and sometimes corrective action on problems with worker compensation, food security, public safety and resource extraction. Recognizing the vital role of local intelligence, CGNet Swara has branched into training citizen journalists. India's Association for Democratic Reforms, or ADR, is a pioneering open government group in the country, which has successfully won the right for voters to know the financial, criminal and educational backgrounds of candidates for office. In a country where reformers sadly note that many candidates are criminals, this matters. The information is made available via Short Message Service on mobile phones. ADR also monitors courts and elections, provides counsel to officials on best practices, and reports on a wide range of transparency and corruption issues.

In India open government is a bottom-up endeavor. Perhaps, as the old saying goes: if the people will lead, then the leaders will follow. Which isn't to say leadership from officialdom can't become transformative. One national data initiative unveiled in 2011 has attracted broad notice in "open" circles but it will take time to gauge its social utility. It was launched this summer by the Kenyan government, which will be joining the Open Government Partnership. The Kenyan open data portal covers a wide range of economic, government spending, health, education and other topics and pointedly emphasizes opportunities to drill-down to the state, regional and local level. There are maps and fact sheets, charts and tables and raw data for developers to create new apps. Community apps developed from initiative data so far include tools to scrutinize energy use and progress on Community Development Fund and World Bank projects, and to map and categorize constituent service needs. An especially useful mash-up is BOOST, which presents annual spending in the provinces side-by-side with demographic, poverty and public health indicators such as percent of households with dirt floors, or connections to the main sewer line; and percent of population that has never attended school, or is of pre-primary age. While young, Kenya's initiative shows how trust and collaboration might grow through open data, although that is just one aspect of the transparency agenda. In contrast, Ukraine, another of the 38 nations joining OGP, is trying to get to first base, by establishing rules of law and building civil society, as I learned when I met with a Ukraine delegation visiting Seattle earlier this year through the U.S. State Department's International Visitor Leadership Program and The World Affairs Council - Seattle. The visitors included representatives of Ukraine NGOs working, variously, to provide legal aid to citizens in property disputes with government; to strengthen the climate for small and medium-sized business by modernizing the tax code and fighting government corruption; and to promote freedom of association and civil society organizations. Other participants represented organizations working to fight media censorship, and to develop civic capacity projects targeted to youth. Knowing their animating concerns, and listening to their questions - which showed keen interest in matters as granular as the posting online of local city council meeting agendas before the meetings are held - I could begin to sense what a more genuinely open government in Ukraine would need to look like.

But for the administration of President Victor F. Yanukovich to have any credibility on open government, a major course correction is needed. As two former U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine observed last March, the nation's reputation for openness is suffering because of a "corrupt, politically-driven judiciary" and state prosecutors doing Yanukovich's political bidding. In October a show trial conviction of his political rival and former Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko added to that perception, sparking vociferous protests and threatening the nation's integration into the European Union. Even before the verdict, the case was being read as, in the words of one expert on European governance, "an extremely worrying sign that (Yanukovich) is moving to exert a monopolistic control over politics." The road to credibility for Ukraine is littered with larger boulders. Consider the conditions described in Ukraine via Transparency International's "Corruption Perceptions Index 2010" report issued this year. Ukraine scored only 2.4 on a scale of 10, far more at the "highly corrupt" end of things than the "very clean." Key concerns included: murkiness about the difference between political and government workers; weak laws on conflict of interest for public workers; lack of competition for high-level public sector jobs; poor legal rights for public servants arbitrarily fired; law enforcement agencies and a judiciary which don't prosecute corruption effectively; a lack of whistleblower protections for public employees; and a lack of annual performance and accountability reports required of the legislature and government agencies.

However, farther from Kiev are promising signs. Open government in Ukraine is building from the grassroots up. Earlier this year, Albertville, Minnesota City Administrator Larry Cruse was part of a local delegation of public officials which visited counterparts in Boryspill, Ukraine in an exchange program intended to build skills and capacity around open government. (A group from Boryspil visited Minnesota in late September.) Cruse lived with a local family for a week and immersed himself in local governance. Unlike like smaller and non-partisan municipal bodies in the U.S., the local council of Boryspil had 48 members from 13 political parties. But Cruse observed that caucuses and negotiations to form issue-specific coalitions helped provide order to the process, and that open government in Boryspil had a strong face-to-face component. Cruse wrote:

A good portion of our time was spent in strategic planning sessions with anywhere from 20 to 50 people representing elected officials, city staff and citizens of Boryspil. Throughout the day, the large groups were broken up into small sub-groups to discuss various topics, exchange ideas and then report their finding back to the larger group for further discussions and consensus building. There were elected officials and staff mixed together with members of the community at all the functions. The students and community members were delighted and emotionally moved to be sharing their thoughts and ideas alongside of the Mayor and other officials.

Read the last of these series tomorrow...

Today's guest blog is a three-part series from Matt Rosenberg. Matt is founder and editor of Public Data Ferret, a project of the non-profit Public Eye Northwest in Seattle, Washington.

U.S. President Barack Obama this autumn joined with other global leaders to formally unveil the Open Government Partnership as the United Nations met in New York City. Funding for the partnership so far is $733,500 from the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, $350,000 from Google and in-kind contributions from the U.S. government, World Bank Institute and others. The eight charter members have already formalized their commitment to the core principles of disclosure, engagement, integrity, innovation and accountability. The eight are the Year One co-leaders the U.S. and Brazil, plus Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Another 38 countries are committed to joining, many from eastern and northern Europe but also seven from South and Central America, four from Africa and three from the Middle East. An important step in the partnership's agenda will come at a March 2012 Brazil meeting with the presentation by each new member of an open government plan of their own, against which future actions can be measured.

The New York event gave rise to the expected lofty statements. In a speech, Philippines President Benigno S. Acquino III, remarked: "This is what democracy is all about: having a government disciplined enough to imbibe in itself the principles of transparency, accountability, and citizen involvement-the necessary preconditions to poverty alleviation and inclusive and sustainable economic growth."

Who could be against imbibing that? But in an open society the media don't always parrot the party line. Only the day prior, news reporters had chastised the White House in print for an advance briefing on the Open Government Partnership by State Department officials who insisted on being described only as "Senior Administration Official 1" and "Senior Administration Official 2". Standard operating procedure in most high-level briefings, true. But, implied the reaction - from the Associated Press, Tech President, and Politico, to name a few - rather discordant for a big "transparency" initiative. It wasn't the first time in recent months that the gap between words and deeds on U.S. open government efforts had drawn notice.

The day after the partnership's formal unveiling, J. Nicholas Hoover of Information Week wrote:

...the Obama administration's commitment to open government hasn't always lived up to its rhetoric. For example, the White House has aggressively pursued whistleblowers and leakers of information, and in court cases has regularly used the defense that certain data must be shielded from the public as state secrets. (A March 2011) event recognizing Obama for a commitment to open government was ironically closed to the press...Congress' record in recent years has also been mixed. For example, while the websites of congressional committees now nearly universally stream congressional hearings, Congress has slashed a key source of funding for transparency efforts. Federal court records are also difficult to access online, and are often available only behind a paywall. The new National Action Plan and international partnership on open government are positive additional steps pointing toward increased transparency, but will ultimately be judged by their execution, and not the initial plans.

Exactly right. Success for OGP will begin with helping member nations understand how to best harness the passion and capacity of disparate ground-level actors - particularly NGOs, local governments, journalists, students, engaged citizens, artists and social media users. To complement important data they already have on the communications and personal technology preferences of constituents, OGP nations should commission independent surveys on how the civic landscapes in their respective nations are perceived at home.

This qualitative harvesting must be incisive and unflinching because real conditions on the ground greatly shape implementation of open government. Earlier this year I led a conversation on transparency with mid-career government officials from Yemen, Tunisia, Guineau, Djibouti, India, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Lithuania and South Korea, who were among the enrollees in a year-long program as Hubert H. Humphrey Fellows at the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs, in Seattle. The dominant concern of the group was how to develop a flexible model for building open government systems, keeping in mind widely varying socio-political environments in different nations. Participants identified some of the big questions that need to guide any open government visioning at national scale. These fell into two broad areas.

1. Political culture. Are political corruption and cronyism an animating concern? How is the national government experienced, on the whole, by the populace? As an authoritative patriarch which discourages close scrutiny? As despotic and dangerous, or unstable? As a work in progress, or  in the best case as genuinely transparent, strategic and collaborative? Do the principles of universal human rights have purchase, and is there true freedom of the press or not?
2. Education, economy and technology. What is the state of education in the country - do scientific and secular views hold sway or not? Are higher ed and institutional R&D in a healthy state, and is there a burgeoning community of public-spirited software developers? Is the economy open or state-run?  What are the particulars of technology adoption and access across class lines?

The answers will help guide whether an  open government planning process can even be credibly launched in a given nation, and how; or whether it may be wiser to take a more incremental approach.

Read the rest of Matt's post tomorrow...

On September 20, 2011 the Open Government Partnership launched with a series of meetings highlighting the transformative nature of open governance. So far, the eight governments that serve as the OGP Steering Committee have submitted their plans. These countries, representing a range of different cultures and histories, have come together in a tribute to the power and importance of transparent and accountable government.

US OGP Action Plan

UK OGP Action Plan

South Africa OGP Action Plan

Philippines OGP Action Plan

Norway OGP Action Plan

Mexico OGP Action Plan

Indonesia OGP Action Plan

Brazil OGP Action Plan

All tag clouds created using Tag Crowd.