Civil Society Selections Short List 2017

Thank you for your interest in, and engagement with the OGP Steering Committee selection process. We’re delighted to share the list of shortlisted candidates, along with their respective scores from the selection committee.  

We received a highly competitive and accomplished list of 29 nominations. The selection committee had a challenging task to arrive at a shortlist of 10 candidates, striking a balance between individual experience and expertise, diversity, regional balance vis-a-vis the composition of the Steering Committee as a whole. At the end of the process, we will select 2 people to join the OGP Steering Committee this year – one to fill a vacant seat in June and the second to join with the new government counterparts on the Steering Committee in October.

In order to meet the candidates, and promote a participatory and transparent debate about their vision for OGP, we will be organizing two webinars in the weeks of April 10 and April 17. Dates to be announced shortly.   

The members of the selection committee – Undral Gombodorj (Mongolia), Laura Neuman (US), Mukelani Dimba (OGP Steering Committee), Aidan Eyakuze (OGP Steering Committee) and myself – started the process by using the submitted paperwork to individually rank each of the candidates using three criteria (details below). This exercise gave an initial insight into the candidate’s’ ability to engage strategically at the highest political level – the level the OGP Steering Committee works at – and to represent the interests of a civil society community across national, regional, and global levels. In addition, we assessed the candidate’s track record of working on open government and related cross-cutting themes, as well as engagement with open government networks.

The details on the criteria used and scoring are given at the bottom of this page. For more information on the rotation process and the role of the Steering Committee, please refer to the Steering Committee Selection tab.

This initial assessment resulted in individual candidate’ scores of up to a maximum of 75 points (3 criteria, 5 points max per criterion, 5 members of the selection committee). All successful candidates scored between 46 and 62 points on the three criteria combined (and non selected candidate scores ranged from 8 to 44).

The criteria broken down ​for initial shortlisting:​

Leadership

• 1 point if leadership is mostly limited to leading an organization and/or leadership experience is roughly 3 years.
• 3 points if candidate has been able to represent his issue beyond his/her organization, played a leadership role nationally (for example on boards) and/or leadership experience is roughly 5 years.
• 5 points if candidate has experience in leading across issues/organisations, played a leadership role internationally (for example in coalitions or boards) and/or leadership experience is roughly 7 years. Candidate has a diversity of leadership experiences (different issues, different settings).

Working across stakeholders

• 1 point if candidate has experience in playing different roles in his/her career but mostly within civil society in his/her country.
• 3 points if candidate has experience in playing different roles in his/her career in different sectors (e.g. government, private sector) or cultures.
• 5 points if candidate is widely experienced in multi-stakeholder initiatives or negotiating across stakeholders.

Ability to read and represent the interests of civil society

• 1 point if candidate is hardly rooted in and connected with civil society in his own country, and/or has experience in only one sector, and/or is not involved in the OGP process nationally
• 3 points if the candidate has broader, more in-depth experience across civil society (e.g. knowledge and networks on more issues), and/or has been actively involved in OGP.
• 5 points if the candidate is very well connected across civil society and issues, also outside his/her country, has the ability to look beyond his/her own issue, country or region, can serve as a listening post and/or has been a leader in the OGP community.

The resulting list was used as a basis for a more in depth discussion on all candidates individually as the scores are only part of the equation. In that discussion we also looked at other crucial factors including diversity across open government issues, regions, and gender. Lastly, we brought into the conversation the endorsements and other intelligence from the community received on the candidates.