The Future is Open – IOD 2018: Aligning open government and open data

Less than a year after the Open Government PartnershipThe Open Government Partnership (OGP) is a multi-stakeholder initiative focused on improving government transparency, ensuring opportunities for citizen participation in public matters, and strengthen... More 2017 Americas Regional Meeting of Buenos Aires, once again, we hosted a large-scale event to discuss global openness policies.

By the slogan “The Future is Open”, on September 27-28 we hosted the fifth International 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... Conference (IODC), gathering over 1500 participants from 85 countries to share lessons learned and challenges in the implementation of open data initiatives. The two day-agenda was created collaboratively through an open call. We hosted 70 sessions with over 200 speakers.

A clear takeaway from the Conference is that open data discussions are not far from the debates that OGP is having. Over the course of the two days, we discussed issues such as access to public information, data and justiceTo address barriers that prevent citizens from having their justice needs met, OGP participating governments are working to expand transparency, accountability, and inclusion into all systems of justi..., data journalism, international openness commitments, genderOGP participating governments are bringing gender perspectives to popular policy areas, ensuring diversity in participatory processes, and specifically targeting gender gaps in policies to address gov... More gaps and open procurement. This shows us how critical it is to align the open data and open government agendas and communities, key objective of our agenda as vice-presidents of the Partnership.

“We are sure that OGP is the vehicle to foster substantive evidence-based reforms that will translate into better public services for the citizens. Thus, we are no longer discussing the reasons for openness, but its essence. Data are a vehicle for the design of citizen-centered policies, inclusionOGP participating governments are working to create governments that truly serve all people. Commitments in this area may address persons with disabilities, women and girls, lesbian, gay, bisexual, tr... More, 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 and anticorruption.” (Andres Ibarra, Ministry for Modernization and Chief Deputy of the Minister Cabinet)

Our country has made significant progress, including enacting the Act of Access to Public Information in 2017, digitizing the public administration, and creating procurement portals and 23 national open data portals. These strengthen our commitmentOGP commitments are promises for reform co-created by governments and civil society and submitted as part of an action plan. Commitments typically include a description of the problem, concrete action... to continue to work on solid citizen-centered policies.

“Open data policies and transparency are key to all solid policies that support democracies”, said the Chief of Cabinet Marcos Peña at the event opening.

IODC was much more than a Conference. It was a space to re-think a road map to integrate open data with a clear purpose – and in a cross-cutting manner – into the global agenda. We believe this will only be successful if we continue to broaden the data community and integrating open government reformers.