Helen Turek
19 Mar 2019, 3 p.m. Room CC9, Level -1 (Conference Centre)
One of the key challenges facing the myriad of Civic Tech initiatives is scaling: they often fail to achieve their full impact potential — not necessarily due to design issues, but rather a lack of an effective dissemination and scaling platform.
Comprising 79 national and 20 local governments and thousands of NGOs, the Open Government Partnership is arguably the most widespread network of reformers, practitioners and activists making governments more transparent, participatory and accountable through the use of technology. Since its founding over seven years ago, OGP has witnessed many success stories — and failures — in co-creating, implementing and scaling Civic Tech initiatives.
Over one thousand reform commitments (roughly 30% of all) have been made deploying technology to further civic participation in government affairs — with varying results and a lot of learnings.
Whether replicating local participation platforms such as Madrid’s Consul across almost one hundred municipal and even national governments; meaningfully scaling citizen engagement across local municipalities for national initiatives such as Italy’s OpenCoesione; or successfully embedding regional reform drives into national agendas such as beneficial ownership transparency across the EU, OGP has proven to be a valuable learning and implementation platform.
Moving beyond pilots and even successful projects implemented, this presentation highlights various examples of how OGP has helped replicate and scale Civic Tech impact across municipal, regional and national borders, as well as suggesting key lessons from these efforts.