Towards the conformation of the Third Greek OGP Action Plan: Open Knowledge Greece makes three commitments

This piece originally appeared on Open Knowledge Greece

On the 5th of July in Athens, the open dialogue on Greece’s Third National 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... to 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 commenced where Open Knowledge Greece presented its 3 commitments for the third action plan.

The commitments of OK Greece included School of Data for public servants, 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... Index for cities and local administrations and linked open and participatory budgets. All of them come with implementation resources and timetables and satisfy all the OGP principles.

The event has been supported by the Bodossaki Foundation and different stakeholders participated: OK Greece, Openwise (IRM), Gov2u, GFOSS, Vouliwatch, diaNEOsis, as well experts from OGP Support UnitThe OGP Support Unit is a small, permanent group of staff that work closely with the Steering Committee and the Independent Reporting Mechanism to advance the goals of the Open Government Partnership.... and Mrs. Nancy Routzouni, advisor on e-Government to the Alternate Minister for Administrative Reform.

OK Greece was represented in the event by its President Dr. Charalampos Bratsas and Marinos Papadopoulos, while OK Greece OGP team in Thessaloniki participated remotely through Skype.

Tonu Basu from OGP Support Unit said that “Staff from the OGP Support Unit had some very productive meetings with representatives from both government and civil society. We were greatly encouraged to see that civil society and government are taking concrete steps to collaborate among themselves and with each other through the development of collaborative networks. Civil society and government collaboration is the key to the strengthening of the OGP process and to establishing a strong culture of a transparent, accountable, and responsive government”.

The discussion has been focused on the improvement of the third action plan and the importance of the collaboration between civil society and government on promoting and strengthening open governance and 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 Greece.

“Bodossaki Foundation participates actively in the conformation of the Third Action Plan aiming to develop and act as an intermediary between civil society bodies and this cause. The goal is the conformation of the action plan with the participation of the civil society and its successful implementation through monitoring and evaluation”, comments Fay Koutzoukou, Deputy Program Director.

Among the challenges addressed in the meeting, great attention was given to the small ownership of the civil society groups in participating in the formation and implementation of the action plan that holds the process back. The suggestions made by the civil society organizations that participated were on monitoring closer the process with regular meetings and assigning specific commitments leveraging both people and government.

According to experts from OGP Support Unit, some of the potential commitments of the action plan, which include issues like subnational, open 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 ..., open justiceAn open, independent, and impartial justice system serves as a foundation for better access to justice by fulfilling all people’s civil liberties and allowing individuals to more effectively protect..., parliament and administrative reform, if implemented as scheduled, they could position Greece as a regional and global leader among the 70 OGP countries.

Nancy Routzouni, advisor on e-Government to the Alternate Minister for Administrative Reform, concludes the event by saying that: “We are very pleased to work and collaborate with civil society bodies as their ideas, knowledge, and feedback are crucial in the process of forming the national action plan”.

The third National OGP action plan had been discussed and approved by the Parliament last week, where the commitments by OK Greece were mentioned, as Nancy Routzouni said in the event in Athens.

See this document for the full list of commitments

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1st 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...

School of Data for public servants: 

The goal is to educate members of pilot selected organizations and services of the Greek government how to create open datasets, publish them to the platform Open Data CKAN of the Greek government data.gov.gr and properly license them with Open Data Licence.

2nd Commitment

Open Data Index for cities and local administrations:

The commitment refers to the online publication of the annual report of the Open Data Index for cities and aims to motivate citizens, business and other stakeholders to contribute and evaluate their municipalities open data.

Key benefits of annual Open Data index for cities reports, are the comparison among the different municipalities acting as an important input on their functions; a process – report that accommodate citizens with the open data (monitoring the state of the municipality according to the dataset and how they can use or improve the results); time based analysis with a comparison of actions that have implemented by different cities.

3rd Commitment

Linked, Open and Participatory Budgets:

Open Knowledge Greece in the context of OpenBudgets.eu -a Horizon 2020 funded project- is developing together with the project partners an open ecosystem that aims to solve the problem of standardization of open spending and budget data and the problem of interoperability of the applications by developing an open technical specification for public sector budget and spending data: the Fiscal Data Package based on OpenSpending Ecosystem and the Fiscal RDF Data Model based on DataCube Vocabulary.

In OpenBudgets.eu an open participatory platform for budgets is developed that will be easy to use, flexible and capable of interpreting previously incompatible forms of budget and spending data, provide advanced capabilities such as calculations of economic indicators(KPIs), statistical analysis and data mining techniques with the appropriate visualizations.