IRM midterm assessment and Open Government Steering Group meeting – 26 September 2024

Hi everyone,

Please find below a few updates from the Open Government team that will be of interest to network members.

IRM midterm assessment

We’re pleased to have re-appointed Andy McDevitt as Scotland’s Independent Reporting Mechanism earlier this year.

An IRM provides independent, evidence-based, and objective reporting to hold OGP members accountable, and to support their open government efforts.

Over the summer, Andy completed the midterm assessment for Scotland’s current open government action plan (2021-2025). This was developed by undertaking desk research, and conducting a series of interviews with those working to deliver the action plan.

You can read Scotland’s mid term report now on the OGP website.

OGP Steering Group meeting – 26 September 2024

The next Open Government Steering Group meeting is due to take place:

:spiral_calendar:Thursday 26 September
:alarm_clock:13:30 to 15:00
:round_pushpin:The Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh

This meeting will act as a workshop for OGP Steering Group members to reflect on Scotland’s current open government action plan. This is an essential stage, as outlined in the IRM midterm assessment, to ensure that we take learnings from the current action plan forward.

If you would like to attend as an observer, please email Doreen.Grove@gov.scot.

Previous OGP Steering Group minute and progress reports – 19 June 2024

You can read back the minute of the group’s previous meeting on 19 June, and commitment progress reports (from December 2023 to June 2024) online.

Thanks Neisha,

An excellent report as always.
Andy’s report is pretty good. It certainly offers an insight into the state of OGP processes, globally. Time now to see about making the insights a little more explicit, so we might change the US (on the inside of a National government department) and THEM (the Global citizens on the outside) culture. Time to reflect on how far you and your team have bought OGP’s support group.

We should also include your blog post here as well, so a new reader might grasp your team’s context. (i,e. the Scottish insider’s perspective).

I also point to the latest UK OGN’s "steering committee" minutes, and note their questions Can we use the (OGP) challenge in the global community to connect with other providing work elsewhere? Connect Scottish-based work to wider international community"

Let’s save time. Consider what may happen if Andy’s report was a Wikipedia article, and not a locked PDF report. And “we” started to compare between National IRM reports to discover (and co-create) what “they” had in common. I know the engineers who run each country’s R&E network wouldn’t be surprised about the tools these global groups wanted to share.

Really like the idea of a wikipedia version of the report content. But is there a new more modern and engaging platform we could use for this? Where we can easily host live data as well as analysis?

Thanks Rachir,

I made this suggestion to illustrate one interactive application which might help change the OGP culture - from an individual producing lengthy and locked reports, to a crowd who co-design and co–produce a constantly updated “article” (as Wikipedia pages are called).

This is a cultural change; little to do with which tool is used. So your question is the right one - communities can’t co-design until they have agreed on a specification for their shared tools. And you’d understand why, if we stand back and look at the larger OGP project from its Support Unit’s perspective, I made this comment to Simon on his thread.

So I will - even though no one around here participates in the voting process - start a thread called “Inter-community communication”. I’ll start by pointing to the tools which are used around the OGP silos that I know off, and ask their managers to pop in here, so we can at least monitor the eyeballs.

Who knows? One day we might even find some more participants who collaborate internationally rather than compare between towns and countries.