Fwd: [ogpbw] Einladung / Invitation: Germany Elections - Open Government Network UK meets DE for strategy
Alexander Howard
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From: Oliver Rack <olive...@posteo.de>
Date: Wed, Dec 11, 2024 at 2:31 PM
Subject: [ogpbw] Einladung / Invitation: Germany Elections - Open Government Network UK meets DE for strategy
To: og...@lists.posteo.de <og...@lists.posteo.de>
Dear friends of Open Government in Germany and beyond,
now that the coalition of the German government has collapsed and extraordinary elections are due in January, we as the civil Open Government Network Germany want to guide the topic of open government and, above all, Germany's participation in the Open Government Partnership safely into the new legislative period and strengthen the ambitions and political awareness beyond the activities of the previous government of the past 20th legislative period.
Although the coalition agreement of the "Ampel"-coalition was a strong commitment and promise regarding open government, open government partnership, open government data and open governance, the issues did not receive the appropriate attention at the federal level, especially in the design and implementation of the processes for developing the national action plans as part of Germany's participation in the Open Government Partnership.
https://sites.google.com/view/oliverrack/ogpbw/koav-lp-20
Here are two comments on the interim report on the ongoing action plan by Transparency International Deutschland eV and The Open Government Institute at Zeppelin University; as well as a strong recommendation from the Open Government Partnership to the federal government from 2022 on how it can improve processes and design.
https://www.opengovpartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Germany_Co-Creation-Brief_2022.pdf
I updated once again
how this is going in Spain here
on
LinkedIn :
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/next-level-open-government-spanien-plan-de-democr%25C3%25A1tica-oliver-rack
-go3gf
(
By the way / Save the Date: The Global Summit 2025
will take place in
October in Vitoria Gasteiz (Basque Country),
Spain, as Prime Minister
President Sánchez recently announced)
We would therefore like to exchange ideas with our civil society partner network Open Government Network UK on their strategic experiences in Open-Gov-Lobby and will virtually meet on
Friday, December 13th at 2pm CET
with Kevin Keith from OGN UK and Carina Paju and Paul Braithwaite, both Senior Regional Coordinator for Europe at the Open Government Partnership. (Specs about the guests at the end of the email)
Link:
https://opengovpartnership-org.zoom.us/j/88698452985?pwd=RfIFWVMxfauQBzsczOFsRFXIEy6o71.1
Topics for next legislative period:
-
Financing CSOs within OGP participation of Germany
-
Developing Open Government Strategy
-
Installation Multistakeholder Forum
There
has been nothing to report here for a while,
partly because of the
weak ambitions of the German Chancellery. Also we
have focused (and still do) on the
process of establishing the National Data
Institute at Germany, which we have
been
promoting in a long-standing initiative and
whose implementation
is currently in the tendering process after some
shoals and rapids
surrounding the budget adjustment.
A
lot of time is also taken up by working in a
consortium to research
and instantiate FAIR Digital Objects (FDO),
a concept for a canonical
metadata infrastructure for coding systems and
registers down to the
level of bit sequences. Personally, I am
interested in researching
the application of FDO in the field of official
statistics when using
experimental and non-traditional data sources and
compiling complex
and multivariate composite
indicators ,
such as incorporating product passports to
calculate hidden price
developments or quantifying a hedonistic "feeling
of price"
(CPI hedonic demand). Furthermore, semantic
interoperability should
be facilitated through probability statistics and
the use of
nanopublications should be expanded.
Here is an example of a
composite measuring
the creative industries in Munich :
https://composite-indicators.jrc.ec.europa.eu/explorer/search?query=public%20service
https://composite-indicators.jrc.ec.europa.eu/cultural-creative-cities-monitor/cities/munchen
The aim is to support the European culture of quality assurance in the area of product components, but also quality assurance in knowledge production, especially when this is highly automated through processing in neural networks. Thanks to rich metadata, already secured findings and relationships from the institutions of knowledge production can be presented in graph databases and fed into vector databases from AI training. This not only reduces the proportion of purely statistical and often imprecise assumptions in the AI's answers, but also the energy consumption of the complex probability calculations.
In order to be able to rely on reliable navigation instruments of data to navigate through future challenges, our institutions must be even better equipped than before to ensure the quality of information and data, especially official statistics. They provide important orientation and decision-making knowledge, because: Democracy needs data and data needs democracy, is the claim of the Federal Statistical Office. The report of the Commission for the Future of Statistics, chaired by Walter Radermacher, also contains important recommendations.
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Ueber-uns/Leitung-Organisation/KomZS/finanzbericht.html
In particular, there is also a need for emancipatory information infrastructures for open governance regimes , as I describe them and which Maximilian Petras grants constitutional status in the chapter " Invisible Infrastructures - Constitutional Foundations of the Freedom of Information Right ".
https://sites.google.com/view/oliverrack/ogpbw/ogp-germany
https://fragdenstaat.de/artikel/igener-sache/2023/10/handbook-informationsfreiheit/
In
order to offset the additional costs of official
statistics in
addition to additional funds and at the same time
to generate and
incorporate stronger beneficial ownership in
society, a Community
Based Monitoring System (CBMS) could be
installed and expanded as
part of the statistics system, for example by
distributing
statistical surveys to households or citizens.
This is partly done,
for example, in the collection of price statistics
in Germany.
Some
countries in the global south have gained a lot of
experience in this
area, which could benefit us at all levels. In my
opinion, such
cooperation in the area of official statistics is
a promising field
of territorial and local diplomacy and development
cooperation.
Moreover, it would also improve the data and
statistical basis for
needs analysis and impact measurement of
development programs. For
example, in May of this year the statistical
authorities of Cape
Verde and the Canary Islands started a collaboration
on statistics for the Blue Economy .
https://ine.cv/noticias/missao-assistencia-tecnica-do-istac-de-canarias-a-conta-satelite-do-mar/or
A
modern state is a learning state.
These foundations of a
data-informed society and politics are also an
important dimension
for state reform as well as goal- and
impact-oriented budget
management and a learning legislative cycle, which
is currently on
everyone's lips in Germany. Apart from the fact
that only an open
state ( OECD
Legal Instruments )
can best develop into a learning state, there
would need to be at
least one register of all administrative units in
Germany, which is
still missing to date.
https://legalinstruments.oecd.org/en/instruments/OECD-LEGAL-0438
After all, the topic of state reform is more virulent than it has been for a long time. From Ralph Brinkhaus' " 100 suggestions for the new state " to Malte Spitz and Tarek Al-Wazir's " A state for all " or Fedor Ruhose's " Modernizing Germany " and the debate paper from the Young Mayors Network, at least four policy papers are currently circulating on the subject. They must not fail to address the strengthening of interoperable data infrastructures and the strengthening of our knowledge institutions to secure orientation and decision-making knowledge.
Young
Mayors Network
https://lnkd.in/dPqeH8B4
The federal
digital strategy for the administration of
the IT Planning Council also raises hopes : "We
support
the administration in using high-quality data for
evidence-based
decisions," it says.
https://www.it-planungsrat.de/fileadmin/
resolutions/2024/Resolution_2024-40_Federal_Digital_Strategy_Future_Vision_and_Guidelines.pdf
The success of the initiative "Civic Coding - Innovation Network AI for the Common Good" (BMAS, BMUV and BMFSFJ) and its anchor project "Civic Data Lab" (BMFSFJ) with partners such as the German Informatics Society, Caritas and the German Red Cross as well as CorrelAid eV has brought stronger support for the topic of "digital volunteering (or engagement)", as has been practiced for well over a decade in the Open Knowledge Foundation, for example. For the first time, digital volunteering (or engagement) is represented as a separate form of engagement in the newly launched engagement strategy of the Federal Government (BMFSFJ) .
-
6.4.3.2 Making data usable for your own engagement
-
6.4.4 Enabling and supporting digital engagement
Stefan Kaufmann of Wikimedia Deutschland eV sees gaps in the design of sustainable use of free software and digital infrastructures as well as in the social aspect of digital engagement - e.g. through local meeting points - but welcomes this development.
A few more highlights:
One
result of this year's UN World Data Forum is the
Medellín Framework
for Action on Data for Sustainable Development;
https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/hlg/Medellin%20Framework%20for%20action%20on%20data%20for%20sustainable%20development.pdf
Sean
Fobbe has prepared an impressive corpus of UN
Security Council
resolutions. Ideal for text analysis.
https://seanfobbe.com/posts/2024-05-06_new-dataset-corpus-of-resolutions-un-security-council/
The
Social License Lab by the Data Tank has launched
with
Partcipation4Data an extension, which focuses on
creating a
participatory framework that centers on meaningful
individual and
community engagement in data use. They strive to
identify, design,
and share approaches that can be systematically
applied across a
broad range of sectors.
https://datatank.org/repository/
The
federal budget plans are available here as a
machine-readable data
set:
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Umwelt/UGR/ueberblick/Publikationen/Downloads/maschinenlesbarer_haushaltsplan_bund_2019-2024.xlsx
How
Hamburg Builds a Data Culture in Public
Administration during it's
Open Government Partnership
https://www.opengovpartnership.org/stories/how-hamburg-builds-a-data-culture-in-public-administration/
Bertelsmann
Stiftung has again published a useful guide to
open data : Open data
for all: The role of civil society
I have also contributed a
few edifying lines :)
https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/de/publikationen/publikation/
did/open-data-for-all-the-role-of-civil-society
Bertelsmann
Stiftung has also updated the sample data sets:
https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/de/unsere-projekte/daten-fuer-die-gesellschaft/projektnachrichten/der-musterdatenkatalog-waechst-auf-rund-30000-datensaetze-an
We
developed a taxonomy of 241 sample datasets. An
algorithm sorts the
municipal datasets into the sample data catalogue
based on the
metadata.
Kevin
Keith
Kevin Keith chairs the UK Open Government Network
(UK
OGN), facilitating collaboration between civil
society and government
to develop the UK's National Action Plans for Open
Government. He
co-chairs the government and civil society
Multi-Stakeholder Forum,
overseeing the implementation of these plans.
Keith has contributed
to discussions on open government at events like
the OGP Global
Summit. He has written extensively on transparency
and trust in
governance, including articles for Civil Service
World and
Politics.co.uk. His work emphasizes the importance
of transparency,
accountability, and public participation in
strengthening democracy.
Kevin Keith has significant professional ties to
Australia. He
advised the Australian Capital Territory
government on city branding
and led the country's inaugural 'smart week' on
urban innovation.
Carina
Paju
Carina Paju is the Senior Regional Coordinator for
Europe
at the Open Government Partnership (OGP),
supporting public sectors
and civil society in the Nordic and Baltic
regions. Prior to joining
OGP in 2022, she led Transparency International's
Estonian chapter,
focusing on open data, lobbying transparency,
whistleblower
protection, and promoting youth integrity through
participatory
budgeting in schools. Her experience includes work
with Concord
Consulting in Denmark and contributions to
Estonia's Ministry of
Foreign Affairs during the UN Human Rights
Council. Carina holds
degrees in Government & Politics from the
University of Tartu and
Global Development from the University of
Copenhagen. Beyond her
professional endeavors, she enjoys traveling,
motorcycling, and
birding.
Paul
Braithwaite
Paul Braithwaite is the Senior Regional
Coordinator
for Europe at the Open Government Partnership
(OGP), leading country
support and coordinating efforts to enhance
transparency and public
participation across 29 European nations.
Open Government
Partnership
Before joining OGP in January 2022, he directed
social and democratic innovation initiatives at
the Community
Foundation for Northern Ireland, including the
region's first
citizens' assembly and participatory budgeting
projects.
Involve
His international development experience includes
supporting
civil society programs on participatory governance
and human rights
in Pakistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
DEUTSCH
Liebe Freunde des Open Governments in Deutschland und in der Welt,
nachdem die Koalition der deutschen Regierung zerfallen ist und im Januar außerordentliche Wahlen anstehen, wollen wir als ziviles Open Government Netzwerk Deutschland das Thema Open Government und vor allem die Teilnahme Deutschlands an der Open Government Partnership sicher in die neue Legislaturperiode geleiten und die Ambitionen und das politischen Bewusstsein über die Aktivitäten der bisherigen Regierung der vergangenen 20. Legislaturperiode hinaus stärken.
Zwar war der Koalitionsvertrag der Ampel bezüglich Open Government, Open Government Partnership, Open Government Data und Open Governance ein starkes Bekenntnis und Versprechen. Jedoch erhielten die Themen auf Bundesebene nicht die dazu passende Aufmerksamkeit, insbesondere auch bei Design und Durchführung der Prozesse zur Entwicklung der Nationalen Aktionspläne im Rahmen der Teilnahme Deutschlands an der Open Government Partnership.
https://sites.google.com/view/oliverrack/ogpbw/koav-lp-20
Hier zwei Kommentierungen zum Zwischenbericht zum laufenden Aktionsplan durch Tranparency International Deutschland e.V. und The Open Government Institute an der Zeppelin Universtität; sowie eine nachdrückliche Empfehlung der Open Government Partnership an die Bundesregierung aus 2022, wie sie Prozesse und Design verbessern kann.
https://www.opengovpartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Germany_Co-Creation-Brief_2022.pdf