Introducing our new Open Government Results Tracker

July 11, 2017

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Open government is a relatively new way of doing public policy. To date there is no common, agreed-upon approach to measuring progress. 

That said, the Open Government Team feels that it’s crucial that we be transparent and accountable about progress on commitments. We think that transparency can help inspire ambition and create opportunities for people outside of government to help us overcome some of our toughest challenges.

A new tool for tracking progress

As a member of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), the Government of Canada is required to track our progress on commitments in the Third Biennial Plan at the mid-point and end-point through self-assessment reports. But we felt there may be opportunities to make our reporting more timely and comprehensive for you. Our hope is that by proactively providing timely information on our progress, we can more effectively generate engagement and identify any necessary course corrections earlier in the implementation period.

As a first step, we have developed dashboards for each of our 22 commitments in the Third Biennial Plan. This approach will make tracking our progress on open government richer, more rigorous and easy to follow for everyone.

We want to help raise the bar on transparency

At the heart of this is more direct and meaningful engagement with you. We hope that this tool will make it easier for you to ask questions about the work we’re doing and to get involved where we have identified areas that we are looking for some additional support or feedback – which you can find under the ‘Challenges’ tab.

This tool is an experiment.  Our working hypothesis is that when we make more information available regarding our work, we create more opportunities for citizen participation and open policy making.  Our hope is that we will, in turn, achieve better outcomes for all Canadians.

Each commitment has its own dashboard that will be updated on a quarterly basis, or more frequently where it makes sense to do so. We want to deliver all that we set out to accomplish in the Third Biennial Plan. By reporting more frequently on the status of our deliverables, we hope to be able to flag challenges early on, enable you to better hold us to account, and leverage your expertise in solving issues both big and small.  

Let us know what you think. You can comment on the dashboards, email commitment leads, and Tweet using the hashtag #opengovcan.  We’re excited about what we can achieve together, and we hope you are as well!


 

Sarah is a member of the Open Government team at TBS, helping to support effective implementation of Canada’s Open Government Plans to the Open Government Partnership. This includes, among other things, supporting governance for open government, providing government-wide coordination of open government efforts, and tracking and measuring open government results.

 

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Comments

Submitted by Jane Arscott on July 31, 2017 - 12:47 PM

Congratulations on the Tracker, Sarah. The Open Government initiative exemplifies the complexity of public policy the federal government has to address in the 21st century. As someone who attended the Open Data Summit 2017, and an academic employed at Canada's first Open University I am following Canada's involvement in the Open Government Partnership with great interest for the global influence Canada can have in all things Open. Like Donald Savoie (2015), I agree with him that Canada's federal government is good at making visionary investments, promoting innovation, addressing wicked problems and managing complex regulatory regimes. Open Government certainly seems to fit that profile! As a feminist scholar Commitments 19 to 21 are of particular interest to me due to their potential to modernize policy-making and policy implementation. Could you provide some guidance as to where to locate women and gender analysis in the schema? I seem to be unable to navigate the site so as to locate keywords. The Fourth Biennial Plan under development may already address feminist aspects of the work to date and going forward, after the OGP received criticism at its last Summit on this score. Canada is well placed to lead in addressing this shortfall, which it can do through its leadership of the OGP in the next three years. . I collaborate with a team of feminist scholars who I am encouraging to engage with Open Government as a vehicle for the collective voice and agency of women globally.

Submitted by open-ouvert on August 01, 2017 - 7:35 PM

Thanks for your comment, Jane. As you may know, Canada was recently elected to join the Open Government Partnership Steering Committee, and will officially become a member of the Steering Committee in fall 2017. Canada will leverage its new leadership role to support peer learning and exchange on key priorities, including the empowerment of women and girls, and strengthening diversity and inclusivity in the OGP. Additionally, we are in the process of developing our engagement strategy for the next Action Plan and one of the areas we’re striving to improve upon is gender equality, by working with gender-based organizations on the promotion of the consultations. Finally, as we engage with Canadians later this year to help us to shape Canada's next Action Plan, we will be looking for ideas for possible commitments and would highly encourage you to get involved and share your ideas to ensure that commitments are inclusive of and address women specifically. Open Government Team