transparency
Open Local Government: How can it be spread?
Workshop idea by Tim Hughes
All of the workshops at Local Democracy for Everyone have been created by our participants. We’re sharing a summary of each workshop idea to help you decide what you’d most like to participate in – and so that everyone can start to share their comments about each idea.
Open Local Government: How can it be spread?
The challenge:
How can greater transparency, participation and accountability across local government be best achieved? What (if anything) is the role for national government, councillors, officers, national & local civil society, media and others in encouraging its spread?
Transparency, participation and accountability are critical to democracy at any level of government. While initiatives are being established to support its spread nationally and internationally, there are no such initiatives to support open local government in the UK.
The UK is a member of an international initiative called the Open Government Partnership (OGP), which supports governments to introduce transparency, participation and accountability reforms. It does this by encouraging a race-to-the-top and peer exchange between countries, securing high level political buy-in for reform, and requiring engagement with civil society in countries.
The OGP provides the opportunity to secure reforms from the UK government that could support greater transparency, participation and accountability in local government. However, perhaps more powerfully, the OGP may provide the template for an initiative that supports local governments and civil society to exchange and compete to introduce open government reforms.
I coordinate the UK Open Government Civil Society Network, and am passionate about encouraging and supporting greater openness throughout institutions. I am keen to explore what this could and should mean in local government.
#notwestminster #opengov
Tim Hughes
@TimJHughes
Open Government Programme Manager
UK Open Government Civil Society Network coordinator
Tim Hughes is Open Government Programme Manager at Involve, with expertise in public participation and open government. He has advised governments at a local, national and international level on engagement, and has written extensively on topics covering public participation, open government and active citizenship. Tim coordinates the UK Open Government Civil Society Network – a coalition of transparency, participation and accountability reformers in the UK – and is an active member of the Open Government Partnership’s international community.
20 Ways to Connect Open Data and Local Democracy
Workshop idea by Tim Davies
All of the workshops at Local Democracy for Everyone have been created by our participants. We’re sharing a summary of each workshop idea to help you decide what you’d most like to participate in – and so that everyone can start to share their comments about each idea.
20 Ways to Connect Open Data and Local Democracy
The challenge:
Lots of energy in the open government world goes into open data. But too often data practices don’t connect with citizens in ways that shift the balance of power and lead to change. With the transparency code leading to an increase in local authority open data publication, we need to re-imagine how open data can be produced, shared and used at a local level.
I’ve spent the last five years studying open data and civic engagement, motivated by a perception of the gap between the democratic potential of open data, and the impacts it is having in practice. This workshop is an opportunity to pull together learning from these various experiences, and turn it into a practice exploration of how local government could do open data. It will also challenge me to come up with 20 different ways to connect open data and democracy.
On the short-list so far: -
Practicing open data engagement
What’s on your list?
#notwestminster #opendata
Tim Davies
@timdavies
Researcher, practitioner and Co-director at Practical Participation
Tim Davies is a researcher and practitioner working at the intersection of technology, civic engagement and social justice. As a PhD Candidate at the University of Southampton, and affiliate at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, he has been working on understanding the democratic dimensions of open government data policy. From 2012 to 2014 he led the World Wide Web Foundation’s Open Data in Developing Countries project, coordinating a global research network exploring the uses of data in local and national governance.
We are #Notwestminster 