City of Austin Open Government Partnership

This tool was used at the June meeting of Austin's Open Government Partnership (OGP) commitment teams

The Value of Project Reflection

Reflection and retrospectives are important for any project, especially if they are done before the project is completed. They provide a "check-in" for teams to assess their progress against the original goal, understand the factors that have affected any changes in scope or pivots, and identify areas for adjustment or additional help. This is particularly important for projects working in a complex context--which is the case for many public sector projects. Without reflection, projects can stagnate, go down the wrong…

At the April 13 all-teams meeting, Angela Hanson did a demonstration of Insights -- a civic participation tool for your OGP toolbox.

WHY AN INSIGHTS CAMPAIGN?

• Insights is a website that enables decision makers to ask a group of people one question and develop insights and decisions based on that input.
• Insights closes the feedback loop with participants so each person knows if and how their voice made a difference in the final decisions. Too often engagement efforts leave participants guessing what happened as a result of their involvement. If people sense nothing happened, they may consider future participation a waste o…

Customer Relationship Management tools can help civil society organizations and governments keep in touch with their collaborators.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are used widely by the private sector to keep track of customer interactions and for marketing purposes. CRMs are also useful for governments and civil society organizations to help build networks, target offerings and engagement opportunities to citizen and resident segments and support community organizing efforts. Often times, a non-profit sector CRM "system" ends up being a spreadsheet on someone's computer, but that can make it difficult to collaborate and lacks the time-sav…

The Net Promoter Score is one easy tool that can be used following an event, meeting, project, or any other kind of interaction to close the feedback loop and demonstrate accountability with your collaborators. This is a simple example outside of OGP of how it can be used.

A Tool in the Toolbox

Austin's Open Government Partnership (OGP) Subnational Pilot Program team includes a commitments portfolio team which supports all of Austin's OGP commitments with tools and resources needed to build the OGP principles of transparency, accountability, civic participation, and technology innovation into their work. The team has deployed the Net Promoter Sco…

In March, we finalized initial teams for all of our commitments, allowing us to have our first all-teams OGP meeting. We chose to focus on the OGP principle Civic Participation.

The meeting’s opening exercise let us hear how each team is promoting the OGP theme of civic participation on many levels (see photo below). In reviewing the results, we observed and learned that:

• many post-it notes of all colors are in the upper left section, which t…

In January, we learned from our teams that they will benefit from offerings that help them integrate OGP values into their work. In response to this feedback, we've identified the Net Promoter Score as our first "OGP Toolbox" offering to help deepen relationships and boost civic participation.

In January, we learned from our teams that they'll benefit from offerings that help them integrate OGP values into th…

A list of open government and/or "smart cities" projects City departments are working on

As part of our effort to identify how to help the City's open government and "smart cities" projects succeed, we compiled this inventory of projects that relate to at least one of the Open Government Partnership's principles of open government: transparency, accountability, technology innovation, and civic participation. The purpose of the inventory is to understand the types of open gov/smart city projects (and opportunities) City departments are involved in, as…

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 te…

Insights to-date on how we might support open government and smart cities projects

This is the start of a series of monthly updates on the City's effort to redesign how we support opengov/smart cities projects (OGP commitment 3). This month's update includes insights we've identified from research to date as well as next steps for designing a revamped process for supporting these projects. For background on the project, check out this summary of the opportunity, as well as this documentation of…