Thanks Chloe,
One question. As you say “here is the readout provided by the government”.
So this is the official record of the meeting, although as it doesn’t contain the names of people who attended or made apologies, so I guess is why they don’t call it “minutes”. Ive never seen that before on any OGP member’s approach.
I’m trying to get my head around the irony that these meetings, which are about open government, don’t seem to have official records published on gov.uk, as is the case with all others, regardless of topic. I’m also trying to understand how, if commitments are being made by government departments, there isn’t an official record of how they were made.
The primary problem here seems to be based around this MSF’s approach to process. In particular:
,. civil society representatives were clear that the public outreach was the weakest stage: the challenge of wider public engagement remained an unanswered question, which is dependent on sufficient time and resources. Reflections also included a shared desire to further streamline OGP processes, recognising that parallel progress was being made to mainstream open government outside the development of a National Action Plan.
From a media perspective the problem about outreach is pretty easy to understand. Just compare the absolute non-existence of any ongoing gov.UK publication that can be followed by any observer, which is the fundamental start of a place from where to outreach. The Scots can do it on one page.
And Neisha, their OGP group’s primary OFFICIAL (and excellent) scribe, could do the outreach (pointing) from lots of other relevant media places apart from this forum. But that’s something every OGP member’s secretariat is attempting to get their head (and time) around.
Lastly. The FDDO has funded:
in particular the open and accountable use of emerging digital technologies.
which means media technologies to policy makers and government secretariats (as I’m pointing out), and infrastructure technologies to public network managers, who have to balance their departmental employees’ security with the privacy of the citizens whose behaviour they are attempting to motivate from being observers to participants.
That’s a bit impossible when one can’t even observe a process.