Meeting notes 29th October 2012

Open Government brown bag lunches (aka. ODI Thursdays)

by Tim Hughes

From this Thursday (1 November) onwards, the Open Data Institute have kindly offered us the use of their space on Thursdays of every week. This will include the free use of desks and WI-FI, and meeting rooms for (brown bag) lunch meetings. The idea is simple: to bring those working on open government across civil society and government together into a common space one day a week to share ideas and co-develop plans.

Thursday will be our first brown bag lunch and it’s going to be an important one. Francis Maude announced at the 17 October Reform and Cabinet Office conference – “The Future is Open” – that the next National Action Plan will be developed in partnership with civil society. With members of the Cabinet Office’s Transparency Team, we’re going to be developing a vision for the scope of the UK’s next National Action Plan that will be put to Francis Maude, the Minister for the Cabinet Office. Here’s a quick message from Sophia Oliver (head of the Transparency Team) about the session:

We want to start work this Thursday on a shared enterprise between government and civil society – the joint development of the next national action plan for the OGP. We’re going to work from the ODI on Thursdays to create a space for collaboration on the plan – and would like to kick off with a discussion this Thursday about a shared vision for the plan that we’ll put to the Minister for the Cabinet Office. Please talk to Tim if you’d like to join in – we’d like to hear from anyone with an interest in contributing to development of the plan so we can get lots of different perspectives and ideas for the plan.

The brown bag lunch itself will run from 1215 to 1345, but we’ll be continuing in smaller groups in the afternoon to develop elements of the vision. Anybody from civil society or government with an interest in open government is welcome to attend. If you would like to come please let me know – [email protected] – so we can get an idea of numbers.