City Council Agenda - November 26, 2012 - City of Guelph

Attachment 1: A Survey of Open Government• Ensuring equity of access to public policy making by lowering thethreshold for access to policy making processes for people facingbarriers to participation.• Fostering innovation and new economic activity. Publicengagement and Open Government is increasingly recognised as adriver of innovation and value creation in both the private andpublic sectors.• Enhancing effectiveness by leveraging knowledge and resources ofcitizens who otherwise face barriers to participation. Publicengagement can ensure that policies are better targeted andaddress the needs of citizens, eliminating potential waste.Involve, a London based advocacy group produced a working paper entitled OpenGovernment: Beyond Static Measures in an attempt to classify Open Governmentand support its characterization through various case studies. A key conceptarticulated in this paper is that Open Government can lead to the development of a“FAST” public sector - namely governments which are flatter, more agile andstreamlined as well as more tech-enabled. The following is a summary descriptionof this concept as it appears in this paper:FAST governments develop innovative public services, effectivelymeet citizens’ needs, care for scarce natural resources and createnew public value. FAST does not necessarily mean speedy,although the time frame for many decisions may be shortened withthe help of collaboration platforms, tools and analytics; nor doesFAST mean ignoring the core government values of merit, equity,checks and balances, accountability and jurisdiction.Framing Open GovernmentAlthough there is a surplus of academic and practical work which can be used todefine Open Government, it still means different things to different people. Code forAmerica is a non-profit organization which sponsors and supports the developmentof civic start-ups in an effort to help better connect government with technologists.A recent application process targeting potential developers of civic apps was alsoused to canvass for language associated with the success of Open Government. Thefollowing word cloud was created as a result of this survey:5 | P age