OGPx – Going Local for Global Impact | Open Government Partnership
A particular focus for a number of us who have made the trip over to Mexico City for the OGP Global Summit is how the OGP can be deepened to involve subnational governments and civil society. Indeed, tomorrow we’re hosting a session on “Taking OGP Subnational”, with participants including Colm Burns (Chair of the Northern Ireland Open Government Network) and Lucy McTernan (Coordinator of the Scottish Open Government Network), which will explore explore past, present and future innovations in applying open government and the OGP at a devolved, federal or local level.
In this post from the OGP blog, Martin Tisne and Julie McCarthy explore the potential for an OGPx franchise:
The demand is there: hundreds of governors, mayors and other local officials are knocking down OGP’s door to sign up and begin sharing their experiences and accessing new international peers and ideas.
The dilemma for Open Government Partnership is how to respond to this demand: should it advance cautiously and pilot a few city-level OGP action plans? Should it embrace this demand in a centralized fashion by increasing its staff, operations and budget to help support these new members? Or should OGP create a more distributed architecture to support these reformers and innovators at city level.
We would propose the latter approach – what we call the OGPx model, in in the spirit of the TEDx (link is external) franchise – for two reasons. First, because it represents a fantastic opportunity for OGP to scale fast without compromising excessively on quality. Second, because it taps into our growing knowledge of what OGP and other governance-focused multi-stakeholder initiatives do best and – we hope – will set OGP up for future success.
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