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OGP Toolbox: Global hackathon & beyond

Caja de Herramientas de OGP: El hackaton global y más allá

Paula FortezaandJohan Richer|

Facilitating the implementation of open government initiatives through digital tools is one of the main ambitions of France and the World Resources Institute as co-chairs of the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The OGP Toolbox, a collaborative platform launched during the OGP Global Summit in Paris (December 6, 7 and 8), was conceived to help achieve that goal.

For the first time at an OGP Global Summit, a 3-day global hackathon was organized which gathered governments, administrations, civil society organizations and members of the tech community to launch international collaborations around digital solutions to improve democracy.

What’s the OGP Toolbox?

Open data portals, public consultation platforms, tools to monitor and co-create the law, discussion forums, civic tech solutions, online platforms to follow the implementation of national action plans: the OGP Toolbox is a collaborative platform that gathers digital tools (software and online services) used throughout the world to improve democracy and promote transparency, participation and collaboration.

The Toolbox contains more than 1200 tools, 180 use cases and 500 organizations, crowdsourced by the international community since April 2016.

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The OGP Toolbox is designed as a social network with concrete use cases, technical criteria informed by the community and recommendations in the form of tool collections that helps find the most adapted tool for each open government initiative and benefit from the experience of users that have already implemented existing solutions.

This platform aims at empowering governments and civil society by facilitating the implementation of national commitments made by governments in their national action plans and encouraging cooperation, peer learning and resource sharing between OGP members.

The OGP Toolbox Hackathon: 70 new international tech projects to improve democracy

Following a series of events, sprints, hackathons and workshops as part of a year-long co-construction effort with the French and international civic tech community, the OGP Toolbox was launched at the Élysée presidential palace on Dec 7. This was the official kickoff of a 3-day hackathon where 500 participants worked together to put open government principles into practice by crowdsourcing the OGP Toolbox, improving open government software and online services, developing new features, translating solutions to internationalize projects and deploying existing solutions in different countries.

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The projects were encouraged to meet 5 criteria, conceived to estimate the impact of their effort:

  1. Contribution: developing new tools or functionalities, re-using existing tools in different contexts or collaborating around digital solutions at the international level,
  2. Internationalization: working with organizations from other countries,
  3. Co-construction: showing collaboration between administrations and civil society organizations,
  4. Documentation: documenting the development of the project, showing progress during the whole duration of the hackathon and allowing people to come on board;
  5. Projection: planning to continue the project in the long-term, in coordination with the new priority collective actions of the OGP.

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Following these criteria, three groups were shortlisted at the end of the hackathon and invited to pitch their projects at the Closing plenary of the Summit at the Hôtel de Ville de Paris:

  1. OpenFisca:

OpenFisca is an open-source simulator of tax-welfare systems, developed in France. In practice, it’s a powerful tool to model the impact of tax reforms on households’ budgets. It was also used to develop Mes aides, an online platform that allows citizens to identify the social assistance programs they’re eligible for. During the OGP hackathon, a multidisciplinary team worked to develop a prototype of Mes aides for Senegal. A collaboration was also launched to reuse the engine in the context of Tunisia.

  1. Open Contracting Toolbox:

The team worked on consolidating a comprehensive tool inventory, gathering experiences from 7 countries. They created a new collection on the Toolbox to share the most useful tools for open contracting and open procurement, one of the main collective actions put forward by the OGP community during the Summit. This collection will help OGP members in getting started by taking example on the best practices set up by the Contracting 5 (Colombia, France, Mexico, United Kingdom, and Ukraine).

  1. Cargografias:

Cargografias is a transparency tool built to visualize the positions held by politicians during their careers, developed in Argentina. During the hackathon, four different groups worked together to build a French version of this tool, using code from Cargografias for the front-end and data from EveryPolitician and Wikidata that was formatted using a revised version of the Popolo standard made by Sinar Project.

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More about the 70 hackathon projects here.

Watch the Summit hackathon sessions here.

What’s next?

The OGP Toolbox will keep evolving in 2017, thanks to the feedbacks gathered during the co-creation process and the global Summit hackathon in order to upgrade the beta version of the platform. New functionalities will allow users to find tools, edit cards, deploy solutions, express their points of view and share their experiences through the platform more easily.

International events will continue to mobilize the OGP community in order to collectively contribute to the development of this digital common that has become a key resource for the Partnership!

Filed Under: Impact Open Data
Open Government Partnership