Tools for Tracking Action Plans in Uruguay

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With the goal of promoting and enhancing transparencyAccording to OGP’s Articles of Governance, transparency occurs when “government-held information (including on activities and decisions) is open, comprehensive, timely, freely available to the pub... More in the tracking process of Open Government Action Plans, Uruguay has deployed four management tools: the Open Government Observatory, the Tracking Meetup, the Achievement Dashboard, and the Open DataBy opening up data and making it sharable and reusable, governments can enable informed debate, better decision making, and the development of innovative new services. Technical specifications: Polici... Tracking Publication. These tools also help in the creation of self-assessment reports through decentralized reporting processes, while creating mechanisms that promote experience exchanges.

Open Government Observatory

The Open Government Observatory consists of a decentralized, IT platform based on a portfolio management system – but from the viewpoint of an ordinary citizen. This platform helps citizens to understand and monitor which initiatives are included in Action Plans; releases progress reports; visualizes the level of accomplishment of every goal; and puts all citizens in contact with the respective project managers responsible for leading the projects of the portfolio. In addition, this tool allows the submission of requests for information and other inquiries and facilitates the contact with the Open Government Team through an email address.

Every institution assigns two people to manage its initiatives and update status. They must manage, report, and update the progress of implementation schedules and upload images, videos, and other documents. Once updated in the platform, the Open Government Team can make data publicly available in the Open Government Observatory.

Tracking Meetup

The main objective of the Tracking Meetup is to set up a face-to-face open discussion space for the exchange of information and experiences between the participants and other stakeholders. It takes place one year into the action plan’s implementation. In this meeting, achievements and lessons learned are shared among participants, while their contributions are also used to develop a continuous-improvement national plan. In the Meetup, successful cases are identified and can also be used as inputs to other projects; new difficulties and problems can be singled out when dealing with the fulfillment of the commitments; and new measures can be developed to mitigate risks.

This tool was created at the request of representatives of civil society, and was incorporated into the tracking process in the 3rd Open Government Action PlanAction plans are at the core of a government’s participation in OGP. They are the product of a co-creation process in which government and civil society jointly develop commitments to open governmen.... The Tracking Meetup brings in those executing the action plan’s commitments, all civil society representatives interested in those commitments, the Open Government group responsible for leading up the initiative in Uruguay, and the IRM researchers who work on new recommendations.

Open Data Tracking Publication

Records containing the percentages of accomplishment of every single commitment are published periodically in open data format. Data contained in this publication is taken from both the government self- assessment report and the tracking report. The main objective of releasing the data is to help civil society representatives – or any other citizen – to reuse the data to create their own tracking tools.

Achievement Dashboard

In order to have both a global vision of the progress of every commitment in a simple displaying mode, and a general framework for displaying the action plans’ achievements, a dashboard panel  was created in which the progress of each action plan is displayed, classified by time period, topic, and assignment owner. The information published in the National Catalog of Open Data is taken and fed into the Achievement Dashboard, where tracking reports can be easily created and released. The data is updated within the dashboard according to the schedule developed for the tracking process of every open government action plan.

The tracking process of action plans in Uruguay is developed by AGESIC. If you want to know more about the implemented solutions, please email at: gobiernoabierto@agesic.gub.uy.