Portfolio Support Team: April All-Teams Meeting on Accountability

OGP Portfolio All Teams Meeting # 2 Workshop Notes

Agenda:

1. Check-in Accountability
2. Tool # 1: Accountability Canvas
3. Open Government Partnership Update
4. May’s Transparency Theme
5. Future Tool: Insights

Accountability Exercise

The Accountability Exercise results have been digitized and are located in this airtable.

Insights:

• Several projects put some of their stakeholders on the line in between the core, advisory and awareness groups
• Most teams identified very few “awareness group” stakeholders
• Commitment 1 has an enormous number of stakeholders
• The public meetings team did not identify anyone outside the immediate purview of City Council and the City Manager’s Office other than the Public. Interesting how other departments, committees or groups are not holding them accountable.

May’s Transparency Theme

• Sabine asked the group how they felt about a public meeting for next month’s Transparency theme
  
  • Commitment 1 found Angela’s tool really helpful and would like a similar tool for transparency. The Equity team agreed.
  • Commitment 3 asked who we might want to invite to a report out meeting. Since each team has varying stakeholders, how many people would relate to all 5 commitments enough to be interested in attending?
  • Commitment 1: Transparency versus accessibility. Daniel: Yes: also transparency versus findability and understandability.
  • Commitment 2: How transparent should we be at which points? It is possible to be too transparent too soon. Suggested we be cautious about transparency at the beginning of the project.
  • Commitment 1: We need to be transparent about the process. Doesn’t have to be just about the project/progress.
  • Need to be transparent about the good and the bad.
  • Being transparent about the barriers you’ve encountered can be very helpful. Adds accountability too.
• Angela described her idea for a Transparency themed event and asked for feedback. We are halfway through OGP and this event might help the teams stay accountable to their teams.
  
  • Commitment 2 thought it might be helpful. They are planning a community engagement around equity right now. A second priority for them is about closing the feedback loop with stakeholders. They could really use some help on this.
  • Open Austin: Bloomfire posts are great and amazing for people that have context. But those that don’t could benefit from a simple landing page on what it’s all about. In response to the comment above about being too transparent too soon, he said “haters are always going to hate” but being transparent early will always pay off and is best for the project in the long run. He mentioned an upcoming transparency camp on May 22. Would like to see something like the ARR GitHub page for all the commitments.
  • Sabine suggested trying bursts of transparency as opposed to one big transparency event. Everyone else agreed they liked this idea. The commitment 5 team is interested in getting help with public engagement. One suggestion was helping with media engagement.

Insights Software Demonstration Conversation:

• Commitment 2 used a Google doc to collect feedback on the draft Equity Tool.
  
  • They are also considering a similar tool to Budget in a Box to collect information from different communities.
• Katherine Duong on the ARR team used a tool called Cultural Probes – an ethnography tool, to provide prompts to get people to tell stories
• Show us your Austin – a tool that provides users a way to tag images