Thank you to all who have participated in developing the OGN 2018 Manifesto document, with edits, ideas and comments.
The document has been edited over the last few days and the text has been consolidated under FOUR themes:
Follow the money in government: Transparency of government budgets, grants, contracts and spending are central to the delivery of public services and scrutiny of spending.
Law, participation and policy: More open decision making processes where citizens can participate effectively will help government and parliament make better decisions.
Strengthening accountability and anti-corruption efforts: Accountability mechanisms at the national, local and global level need modernising. The UK must tackle illicit financial flows and build on its work to increase transparency of aid, the extractives industry, and beneficial ownership data.
Building open data infrastructure for action: A public data infrastructure will support good governance and innovation, but it must also respect privacy and citizen rights.
The period for further comment under ‘Network Consensus’ has been extended a few more days for your feedback - until 5pm on Thursday 24th May. After that, I will start to get the document ready for publication before the end of the month.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask.
Thanks to those who have already commented on the OGN Manifesto document pulling together the various proposals and ideas for open government reform. This is a reminder that today is the last day to provide comments to the Manifesto document that will be published next week.
Dr. Michael Macpherson
Psycho-Social and Medical Research PSAMRA ~ Integral Studies
Guildford and Berlin
In reply to Open Government Manifesto - 2018
2. Law, participation and policy
Comment:
Participation limited to being consulted and having better access to
government information and actions is ok but has proved insufficient for
modern state of the art democracy. For the latter we should add elements
of thematic democracy directed by citizens to our indirect,
“representative” democracy. Participation without political power is
ineffective and worse will lead to frustration and then “voter apathy”.
By introducing elements of thematic, citizen-led democracy we
effectively transfer political sovereignty back from Parliament and
monarch to the electorate where it belongs. We need the right of
citizens to launch ballots on any public issue, the citizens’ law-making
proposition (“initiative”) and the veto-referendum to block bad or
unwanted government law or policy. More detail is at http://www.iniref.org/enter.html
As you may have noticed, we published the UK Open Government Civil Society Manifesto 2018 last week. We have been tweeting about it and encourage you to also do so #opengovmanifesto2018. It brings together all the ideas and proposals from civil society together, under four overarching themes:
– Follow the money in government: Transparency of government budgets, grants, contracts and spending are central to the delivery of public services and scrutiny of spending.
– Law, participation and policy: More open decision-making processes where citizens can participate effectively will help government and parliament make better decisions.
– Strengthening accountability and anti-corruption efforts: Accountability mechanisms at the national, local and global level need modernising. The UK must tackle illicit financial flows and build on its work to increase transparency of aid, the extractives industry, and beneficial ownership data.
– Building open data infrastructure for action: A public data infrastructure will support good governance and innovation, but it must also respect privacy and citizen rights.