In the past, the City of Buenos Aires had very few opportunities to work on public policies concerning the LGBTQIA+Increasing opportunities for participation and creating accountability mechanisms for the LGBTQIA+ community in policy-making and service delivery can ensure that their voices are heard and changes ar... community from an open government perspective. Through an OGP 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..., my team, the Undersecretariat for Open Government and Accountability, is working to increase their participation and improve 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... about different subjects that impact diversity to improve policy design and influence public policies.

The core of this commitment is to achieve a participatory process with more diverse actors, including the LGBTQIA+ community. With that aim, we conducted workshops with LGBTQIA+-focused and civil society organizations to improve our understanding about which information is important to be published and the obstacles that prevent these communities from participating and communicating with the government. Then, under the commitment, we will run two workshops to identify obstacles in the access to rights for the community. Finally, we will share the information from this process back with the community and policymakers.

Setting Our Goals

When we started to think about our third 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..., we had two clear goals in mind. First, to open the process to new civil society partners, so as to make the plan more inclusive. Then to make commitments with more impact on the society and, in particular, on vulnerable populations.

In the last years, Buenos Aires had the opportunity to improve a lot in open government and open data agendas. During the first steps, we implemented open government policies around access to information, open data websites, and the creation of the Open State Forum. This provided the basis and the institutional culture to incorporate principles of open government in different thematic areas such as 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, climate change, transportation, educationAccountability within the public education system is key to improving outcomes and attainment, and accountability is nearly impossible without transparent policies and opportunities for participation ..., and housing.

For this action plan we had the opportunity to improve our vision and co-create commitments with more direct impact on people’s lives. We also received proposals from partners of commitments regarding gender and diversity, which inspired the specific topic areas for the commitment design on LGBTQIA+ data.

Creating an Inclusive Co-Creation Environment

The first step on the co-creation processCollaboration between government, civil society and other stakeholders (e.g., citizens, academics, private sector) is at the heart of the OGP process. Participating governments must ensure that a dive... was sharing an online form to propose ideas for the commitments. Thanks to it, we received some ideas concerning open data of gender and diversity. One idea was to unify criteria and to incorporate new diversity indicators in the surveys and statistics from the City of Buenos Aires, so there could be more information about it.

So we had meetings with the General Direction of Coexistence in Diversity, the General Direction of Statistics and Censuses and the Secretariat for Gender Equality, to discuss the viability and the challenges about this idea. During this stage, we started to think about how to improve the mechanism of collecting information and publish all the information available so that it was open to the public.

Then, with these ideas in mind, we organized co-creation meetings with civil society partners. 

With an innovation methodology, we discussed how to define the commitment, and a lot of new ideas emerged. The civil society organizations emphasized the importance of incorporating access to rights perspective to the commitment. So, with the ideas of the government areas and the ideas of civil society we co-designed the “Opening of data on access to rights of the LGBTQ community” commitment.

The co-creation process was open to all. We also asked our civil society partners to convocate and identify priorities from their communities, so we could have more representative engagement. Because of this public invitation, fortunately, a lot of new civil society organizations and representatives from the LGBTQIA+ community participated during the co-creation meeting.

Time for Action

From that process, we incorporated our usual civil society partners and a lot of new actors from the community into the first activity of the implementation of the commitment.

In May we organized, alongside with the General Direction of Coexistence in Diversity, the first workshop to kick off the commitment with the civil society partners. We discussed concerns about the need for more information about access to health, education, security, housing, and systematized information.

During the meeting, the General Direction of Coexistence in Diversity presented their work on rights protection and promotion of rights and visibility, and the General Direction of Urban Anthropology presented the Urban Quality Index, with a Gender Perspective that was recently published. This inspired a discussion on the importance of including differing perspectives to think and design the public space.

Lessons Learned

This process allowed us to incorporate new and important learnings. First, we confirmed the importance of coordinating between different government areas involved in the agenda, engaging the General Direction of Coexistence in Diversity, and involving experts from different areas such as statistics, gender, health, and education. This is a key aspect in all of open gov policies, but it applies particularly in transversal agendas, such as diversity.

Secondly, we learned that it is very important to improve the communication channels in order to form a network between all of the participants. This allowed us to incorporate the actors to whom the policy is destined (in this case the LGBTQIA+) into the design and implementation of the commitment. 

We are used to working with civil society partners from the open government, 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 institutional quality community. Although their perspective is important, it is important too to incorporate the involved community to ensure the commitments address their needs and priorities from the beginning.

Finally, the most important element about our experience is that we were able to ratify the importance of the knowledge generated by civil society organizations, and that it is important to incorporate it into our work. For example, some organizations presented reports with new data concerning LGTBQIA+, and we generated a shared folder that not only grants free access to this information, but also allows everyone interested to share any other information about the subject.