OGP Global Summit 2016
Since 2011, the Open Government Partnership (OGP) has become a multilateral organization that gathers seventy countries, NGO's, and representatives of civic society in order to promote the principles of transparency, citizen participation and open government. Three basic pillars in the fight against corruption that boost the development of new technologies, innovation and progress.
Since the OGP was created, the participating countries have made over 2,500 commitments to make their governments more open and accountable. On the occasion of its fifth anniversary, the OGP has decided to analyse its achievements in these years and those areas that need an additional effort to make the OGP meet its commitment to change the government culture.
In this regard, the organization has identified several challenges to face in order to find a solution: to strengthen government leadership and ambition; to ensure that civil society truly has the space to dialogue and work with government; and to ensure that commitments made address material policy concerns at country level and ultimately improve the lives of people.
To that end, a strategic refresh has been commissioned by the Steering Committee which defines the guidelines for the next years. So, in the last months a series of events that engage the community have been organized to share the priorities from the diverse thematic interests and include them in the OGP’s agenda. In this way, during the last International Open Data Conference, a meeting, organized by the entity, took place for the civil society community to shape OGP's future direction and work.
Within this activity program, and as co-chair of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) since last October, France will host its fourth OGP Global Summit in Paris from December 7 to December 9. The event will involve 3000 participants from all over the world; heads of state and governments, public servants, members of parliament, local authorities, civil society representatives, developers, researchers, journalists or researchers will gather in Paris to share their experiences and best practices to push forward the global open government policies.
On last April, a process of co-construction of the program for the OPG summit was launched, in order to build an agenda that reflects the priorities of the participants. The call for proposals was open till the end of July, gathering 660 international proposals which were available on ogpsummit.org and open to the public so they could actively participate in the selection process. A committee formed by government authorities, OGP members and representatives of civic organizations were chosen to analyse and select the proposals. In addition, several workshops and barcamps were organized in different regions of the world where participants had the opportunity to share their ideas to define the main themes of the summit.
Transparency, mobility, sustainable development, digital commons, access to information… are some of the areas to be addressed during the activities of the three working days, where not only the international collaboration and the exchange of digital resources will be discussed but, at the same time, concrete open government cases with a positive transformative impact on citizens’ lives will be presented.
