NI Open Gov
The Northern Ireland Open Government Network is a loose alliance of individual citizens and representatives of voluntary/community organisations aiming to engage in dialogue with the NI Executive to campaign for a more open form of government. We want government to be more transparent, participatory and accountable to the people it serves.
We aim to use the international Open Government Partnership as a vehicle to achieve this objective and are making links with similar civil society networks in the UK and Ireland.
27th November 2019
Join OGP on Friday, December 6th for a webinar on opening justice! Justice is an emerging area in open government. Thanks to increased global activity around access to justice, there is growing interest by many governments and civil society organizations to better link justice with open government, and to use the OGP platform as a…
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25th November 2019
Colm Burns, Chair of The Northern Ireland Open Government Network and Sue Gray, Department of Finance Permanent Secretary Awards of between £300 and up to £5,000 are available to fund the development of apps or other interactive visualisations that make innovative use of data on the Open Data NI portal. Organisations and individuals hosting engagement…
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21st November 2019
The Open Government Partnership has announced that Open Gov Week 2020 will take place on May 3-10. Open Gov Week is a global call to action intended to promote democracy, foster inclusion and improve governance. The week brings together changemakers, thinkers, and doers from in and out of government to listen to each other’s ideas,…
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17th October 2019
Written By Antje Otto In Northern Ireland, the Department for Communities sets out the vision and statutory guidance of community planning. The outcome of community planning is “to deliver more effective local democracy”. This is to be achieved through a process which places “the need of all citizens at the core” (2015)., Consequently, only the…
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13th June 2019
Written Colm Burns The UK’s fourth Open Government National Action Plan 2019-21 (NAP), published just in time for 6th Open Government Partnership Global Summit in Ottawa on 28 May 2019, builds on the previous plans published in September 2011, September 2013, and May 2016. The NAP was developed in dialogue with the UK Open Government…
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13th June 2019
Written by Ann Allan Originally posted on apvallan.com On Friday I attended the Democracy Games at Stormont. Now I’m sure you’re asking what are Democracy Games and aren’t you a bit old to be taking part in any sort of games. I was in fact there to host on behalf of the Open Government NI…
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12th June 2019
Written by Jenny Muir What does democracy mean to us? Has its meaning changed over time? Which countries are the most democratic? How does good democratic practice relate to activism? What are the barriers to achieving change? NI OGN Directors Paul Braithwaite and Jenny Muir led a workshop asking these questions – and more – …
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10th June 2019
Written by Connor McLean “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…” – speaker at OGP Summit quoting Winston Churchill This year’s OGP Summit was hosted in the Canadian capital, Ottawa. The sixth international gathering of its…
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26th February 2019
Written By Colm Burns I voted for the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in May 1998 because I felt it was the right thing to do. I was 20 and not politically active, and hadn’t actually read the Agreement but I did grow up in North Belfast beside Girdwood Army Barracks. I remember the bombs and…
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14th January 2019
Written by Colm Burns On the 9th January 2017 the Executive and Assembly collapsed. Whilst there are many reasons for the collapse, it doesn’t look like our political representatives will be back any time soon. Before the collapse we had more than a year of deadlock and failed attempts to resolve differences over issues such…
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