A proposal to the Open Government Partnership: going beyond the agenda

Open Gov Forum

We publish the proposal email produced in sharing with other associations involved in the consultation and participation process of OGP Italia and sent to the Open Government Forum. This post appears simultaneously on other sites.

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In the framework of the process proposed by the Department of Public Administration (Minister Madia - Presidency of the Council of Ministers) to civil society organizations to define the Italian agenda of theOpen Government Partnerships, we have created a coordination between some of the participants in the tables to share the objectives and priorities to be submitted to the administrations.

For this reason we at Openpolis, wave, States General Innovation , Spaghetti Open Data, Reactive Citizens, Open Knowledge International – Italian chapter, on 9 June 2017 we sent the email below to the Open Government Forum, in which we will inform you of any updates.


Good afternoon to all the OGP Italy team,

following the email sent on the afternoon of 3 June, we would like to propose a new action to be integrated into the Action Plan as an addendum by some civil society actors.

In this way we could complete the picture of the actors indicated on the Addendum description page on the open.gov.it site (http://open.gov.it/consultazione-addendum/), “The Addendum is divided into two parts: one dedicated to Public Administrations; one dedicated to the Institutions of the Republic.”, also including civil society, in line with the very principles of the Forum in which we are participating.

One year after the start of the work of the OGP Forum, we deem it necessary to integrate the Plan with an action that helps and complements the various actions regarding Open Data.

As already anticipated, the action has the objective of facilitating the recovery of data useful for growing civic projects, optimizing and rationalizing requests through the activation of a single civil society-PA interaction channel which we imagine must necessarily be managed by the Public function. This action is aimed at matching the supply with the real demand for data useful to society and monitoring its release.

In this regard, there are some open questions:

  1. Is it possible to add a new action to the Action Plan by civil society, in the same way as the actions included in the addendum proposed by public institutions?
  2. After having made an initial structured proposal, is it possible to place this action in consultation, as well as for the others included in the addendum?
  3. Are there any additional guidelines to use when drafting an action other than those already mentioned during the initial stages of the June 2016 OGP Forum?
  4. 15 days after receiving confirmation of the possibility of integrating the Action Plan: is this a valid deadline for sending the action proposal?

Once these initial doubts have been clarified, we will share the structured action proposal we are working on. We anticipate some elements:

  • there is an aggregate demand for data within very specific civic projects, such as Ricostruzione Transparent (http://ricostruzionetrasparente.it) for example or the line of investigations and monitoring work on contaminated sites and asbestos managed by the association Reactive Citizens, also recognized by the Ministry of the Environment itself (http://www.minambiente.it/comunicati/galletti-fondamentale-ruolo-educazione-su-temi-ambientali). Both of these projects need certain response times, an easily accountable public process and a channel that is always open for requests. A channel that always remains open, beyond the consultations relating to the data that institutions can organize and the annual update of the national agenda for the enhancement of public information assets. The agenda is a tool in the hands of public institutions: this channel would help to improve and strengthen the relationship between data supply and demand, acting as an enabling factor for the agenda and an element of simplification in the management of data demand;
  • being guided by demand is a fundamental aspect also considering the corporate world, which is very attentive and critical of the often unknown times hidden in relations with public institutions. Having a channel with certain response times and a public flow to understand at what point the request has arrived would also stimulate greater involvement of these players, improving the entire ecosystem;
  • one of the specific objectives of the action will exploit a precise demand for data to test the created channel, in such a way as to be able to improve it and to be easily accountable, without waiting for the conclusion of the third Action Plan.

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