Portfolio Support Team: January Lessons Learned

January 2017

Background

In 2016, our Open Government Partnership (OGP) Pioneer Program application proposed five projects, or “commitments”. These five commitments emerged from asking our community to identify Austin’s open governance challenges and opportunities, and their answers involved efforts that were well under way, just starting, or not yet in existence.

In January 2017, we returned from the OGP Summit, a newly minted member of the inaugural Pioneer class, with the inspiring work to knit together the communities within our five very different commitments and create one cohesive OGP effort.

Our first full month of OGP activity came with important lessons learned.

Lesson #1: Every Commitment Needs Something Different

Every commitment needs something different from us.

Every commitment is at a different stage of development. The organizations and departments working on our HOST homelessness effort have two years of collaborative experience; the departments and staff working on our internal Open Government Operating Board changes have a year of work under their belt; our new Equity Officer joined the city in October and leads our first equity tool efforts; the scope of our public meeting commitment could expand depending on growing interest in the topic; and we are staffing our project tracking tool commitment as we speak. In short, each commitment has different members at different stages of collaboration.

Going forward, we will carefully craft our communications to each group.

Lesson #2: Shift From Requirements to Offerings

We have great collaborative discussions when we talk about what the OGP team has to offer, not just what OGP requires.

The staff and community members working on each of our commitments care deeply about their respective issues of homelessness, equity, governance, and meetings. Our effort to infuse their already amazing and diligent work with OGP’s values and inspiring standards has to be a value proposition worth the extra effort. There are services we can offer that simultaneously amplify the teams' efforts and fortify our compliance with OGP requirements, such as offering to turn our one-on-one conversations into blog posts that provide publicly accessible information and promote accountability.

Going forward, we will be talking about what we and OGP have to offer that results in an even more valuable benefit to their effort and our community.

Lesson #3: How to Talk About OGP

We have great collaborative discussions when we talk about OGP as “how” we do what we do, not just “why” we do what we do.

At the end of the day, the Open Government Partnership principles we all know and love are a means to an end, not the end itself. The principles of accountability, transparency, civic participation, and technology innovation are characteristics of any open government process, regardless of whether the project is an open data portal or new health care services.

Going forward, the principles’ sustainability depends on people making them part of "how" they do what they do every day, not just "why" they do what they do this year.