The City established the Open Government Operating Board (OGOB) in 2011 to adopt and implement Open Government practices that will promote transparency, citizen participation, and collaboration to improve how government works, provide more effective government services to customers, and establish a more robust democracy. The charter for the OGOB is available here.
In light of the changing landscape of technology, City departments are faced with an ever-increasing number of opportunities, initiatives, and projects involving “smart cities”,…
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 ac…
City of Austin Open Government Operating Board charter
Outlines the members, purpose, and responsibilities of the board.
Read it at the following link: Operating Board Charter
Documentation of how we identified and framed challenges in governance of open/smart initiatives
Presentation and recap of Open Government Operating Board meeting on September 7, 2016.
Read it at the following link:…
Summarized meeting notes January 4, 2017, 10:00 AM - 12:00PM
Core Team Partners present:
- Christopher Kennedy, Civil Society Partner
- Mateo Clarke, Civil Society Partner
- Alba Sereno, Civil Society Partner
- Mayor Pro Tem Kathie Tovo, Ci…
In collaborating with our colleagues at the Open Government Partnership, and with the social impact firm Reboot, we discussed what makes a good OGP commitment.
According to the Open Government Support Unit, a commitment includes the following elements/qualities. It is:
- Ambitious - you can build on something, but you should take it further than what you were doing already.
- Specific - a declaration of what you want to do that can be measured
- Relevant to open government - accountability, transpar…
In recent years, the method of organizational change known as co-creation has spread rapidly in the business sector. In a co-creation effort, multiple stakeholders come together to develop new practices that traditionally would have emerged only from a bureaucratic, top-down process (if, indeed, those practices would have emerged at all).
Find more information at this link: …