Open Government

The term "open government" refers to a new concept of public governance at central and local levels, based on models, tools and technologies that enable the government to be more "open", "transparent" and accountable to their constituency, especially in regards to designing, formulating and implementing public policies (OECD, 2003).

While the early requests for open government as e.g. demanded in the OECD study of 2003 remained rather unheared, in 2009 the US government reinvigorated the demands for more collaboration, participation and transparency through the Obama Administration (cf. Dawes and Helbig 2010). Since then, the Open Government concept is steadily changing the previous concept of e-government to encompass more strongly the good governance principles (cf. Wimmer 2011). With the guiding principles of transparency, participation, openness and collaboration, Open Government has at first led to the set-up of open government data portals (e.g. data.gov, data.gov.uk), where  maps, demographics, election results, values ​​of pollution and traffic, economic data and much more government data has been made accessible openly.

In 2011, the Open Government Partnership  - OGP (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/) has been launched.  It is a multilateral initiative (a platform) that aims to achieve concrete commitments from the member countries for the implementation of actions to openness, transparency and civic engagement, in order to be more responsive to citizens. Since then, OGP membership is steadily growing.

Related terms: Open Government Data, Good Governance

References:

Dawes. S.S., and Helbig, N. (2010). Information Strategies for Open Government:
Challenges and Prospects for Deriving Public Value from Government Transparency. In M.A. Wimmer et al. (Eds.): Electronic Government, EGOV 2010, LNCS 6228, pp. 50–60

OECD. Open Government: Fostering Dialogue with Civil Society. OECD Study, 2003

Maria A. Wimmer. Open Government in Policy Development: From Collaborative Scenario Texts to Formal Policy Models. In Natarajan, R. and Ojo, A. (eds.): ICDCIT 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (# 6536), Springer-Verlag: Berlin Heidelberg, 2011, pp. 76–91