My OGP story began in September 2010 when President Obama delivered a speech at the UN calling for countries to make bold commitments to open up government, fight corruption and boost transparency. We had been told to look out for a big announcement pertinent to open government in the President’s UN general assembly speech, but never dared hope for the type of impact that it had. The White House was interested in a partnership to set up what would become Open Government Partnership (OGP), and reached out to the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, a donor collaborative bringing together leading opengov funders which I worked for.

Those were exhilarating times. We had no idea we were building a multi-stakeholder initiative, let alone one which five years later would have grown to 70 countries and be responsible for 1000s of opengov commitments around the world. My initial job was to put together a list of all the countries in the world with an ambitious opengov track record and for each country to identify both government reformers and civil society activists. I travelled the world by email and phone, relying on the kindness of NGOs, governments and funders worldwide, generous with their time and expertise. Within a few weeks, we had assembled a fascinating who’s who of innovators, thinkers, reformers in the public and private sectors. The information paved the way for a meeting of reformers, government officials and civil society in equal numbers, at the White House in late January 2011.

We walked into the meeting thinking we were exchanging ideas, learning about innovations from around the world, and walked out of it having constituted the founding steering committee of a major global initiative. The memory of that meeting will stay with me for a long time. From my perspective, it was the enthusiasm in that room, the deep sense that innovations really do come ‘from everywhere’ that laid the foundations for what would then become OGP. I remember vividly an exchange about India, where we learned of the social audits implemented under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act where details of payments from government contracts were etched on hundreds of thousands of walls for all to see and scrutinize. We learned of plans from the agency responsible for the reconstruction of Aceh for community monitoring of the building works, and many more. So many projects, and ideas for projects, that were enthusiastically exchanged by high level government officials and civil society alike. There was magic in that room.

It is that spirit which for me defines OGP, and which we sought to capture over the next few years.

We spent the following few years building the foundations of the Partnership. Stunned to have 46 heads of state and senior officials attend our launch event in September 2011 and 38 countries join, we needed to hurry and build an initiative to enable those commitments come to fruition.

A criticism of the process we built is that it is light on sticks, and heavy on carrots, meaning that there are many incentives for governments to do the right thing, yet few restrictions in place if they do not. This is a critical debate. When Azerbaijan was rendered inactive as a member country last Spring, this was a seminal moment in the life of the initiative.

Equally, we should better understand the attraction of OGP, what it can do for a country, for a reformer, to an idea. We need to understand the ‘carrot’ much better than we do at present. “Why do countries join OGP?” I have been asked the question many times but the truth is we don’t know the answer as well as we should. At its best, it is about inspiration, knowledge exchange and the spark that can ignite ideas and action when people passionate about the same cause are put in a room together.

We should be trying to recreate the ambiance of that early meeting in that room in DC, and do it more, do it better. The beauty of OGP is when we find the space to work together with a common purpose. The work undertaken by Open Contracting Partnership exemplifies this, leveraging the power of OGP and leading to 19 open contracting commitments in 15 member countries.

This is for me the challenge of the next five years – we have built architecture of the Partnership and in some ways have become the victims of our scale. Opengov reformers are dedicated to making 100s of National Action Plans a success: how best can we now support them? It is hard enough to help one idea come to life, how do you support thousands of them to their fullest potential? OGP needs to help bring those new reform ideas to life, at scale. Helping the mid-career civil servant committed to opengov and looking for good ideas, linking her or him with like-minded peers and civil society from geographies s/he may not even have thought of, and then co-creating exciting local reforms which will in turn be emulated and replicated the world over. Then do it again, 100-fold.

If innovation comes from everywhere, OGP should be its home. For the next five years, I look forward to an OGP rich with the stories of reformers sharing their enthusiasm and passion for open government.

The Panama Papers leak, and exposure of potential corruption on a global scale, has helped reveal just how much more must be done to shine a light on the shadows where corrupt activity takes place. Data, and better use of it, has to be central to this effort.

The incredible work done on the Mossack Fonseca exposé by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and others could not have come at a more opportune moment. Next week David Cameron will host world leaders at an Anti-Corruption Summit in London, which presents him with a huge opportunity to show leadership on this issue. As the Panama Papers have shown, corruption knows no borders. As with the game of Whack-A-Mole, closing a loophole in one place leads to the exploitation of another elsewhere. Working alone, the UK would achieve little, but working in collaboration with the global community it could make significant progress. At the Summit the assembled world leaders need to agree on how they can work together to prevent corruption and improve the lives of the victims across the world — citizens who suffer when public finances are diverted from the national purse to an individual’s pocket or hidden offshore structure.

Fundamental to this international collaboration will be getting agreement on the need for greater openness and more specifically, greater commitment to open up and use data more effectively. If we are to truly tackle endemic corruption on a global scale, we cannot afford to solely rely on the brave actions of a few whistleblowers. In addition, we need systematic, multilateral action to unleash the true potential of open data to power global efforts to tackle corruption.

Open data can become a powerful weapon in tackling all forms of corruption if the Summit delivers three things: it ensures the right information is reported and released; it ensures effective transmission of data to those who can use it to drive change; and it equips data users with capacity and space to act on that information.

However, if the global open data movement taught us anything over the past few years, it is not to trust the ‘invisible hand of data’. In other words, not to assume that the sole act of opening up data will magically lead to its better use by those who need it most. For open data to be of use, we must first reach out to users to understand their needs and act accordingly. One such example is the Open Contracting Partnership, which reached out to government reformers, lawyers, private sector companies, and media before developing its open contracting data standard that is already being supported in over ten countries.

We want to see a commitment from governments to engage with innovators who use open data to tackle corruption — such as law enforcement agencies, investigators, the media, and forensics teams — to bring them together, make efforts to understand their data needs, and ensure that they get access to what they need to uncover wrongdoing and prosecute where appropriate.

Once the data is released, we want to see the right groups alerted and working together to dissect and analyze it. This should involve investigative journalists, data scientists, local reformers, law enforcement specialists (in both forensic/prosecutorial capacity), independent forensic teams, financial institutions, and other key actors. Many of these actors have yet to work together to increase the uptake of open data, and the Anti-Corruption Summit presents a unique opportunity for them to do just that. This would be genuinely ground-breaking. There are very few or no open data initiatives that specifically identify data that helps corroborate and contextualise evidence leading to corruption prosecutions.

Finally, let’s not forget that the format for presenting data also matters. As we have seen from the Mossack Fonseca documents, the sheer quantity of data and its lack of inter-operability makes analysis and dissection extremely difficult. We cannot afford to remain stuck in the 1990s with investigators labouring through hundreds of thousands of documents manually. Much like Google changed the way we search for information, we need to change the way we search through data.

For open data to drive anti-corruption activity it needs to become accessible, timely, relevant, and comparable. As such, we hope to see the governments present at the Anti-Corruption Summit sign up to the Open Data Charter and implement its six core principles for opening up information.

The Panama Papers leak serves as a timely reminder that knowledge is power, and access to and the use of data is fundamental for tackling global corruption. If we are to transform open data into a powerful anti-corruption tool, the Prime Minister and the other world leaders need to recognise its critical importance. They must commit to work together to ensure the rightdata is made available to the right people in the right format, and then support its use to cast a digital net over corrupt individuals — leaving them with no place to hide their ill-gotten gains.

By Julie McCarthy & Martin Tisné

One of the first letters the Open Government Partnership (OGP) received upon its creation was from a mayor in Colombia, requesting that his city be able to participate in the initiative. But we had to turn him down. At the time, this was understandable: OGP was growing at break neck pace from zero, to 8, to 64 country members and our entire focus was on national governments.

Should we have done differently?

We see profound innovation and energy in advancing more accountable and participatory leadership and service provision at the local level.  Cities are where most people are increasingly located and where innovation lies. Under Mayor Patricia De Lille’s leadership, Cape Town recently became the first African city to launch an open data portal, which makes city budget and tendering data readily available to the public for the first time. In Paris, Mayor Anne Hidalgo recently opened up €75m to participatory budgeting and attracted 77 crowd-sourced projects. In Medellin, Mayor Anibal Gaviria has helped revitalize a city wracked by violence and corruption through a unique approach to “people led” governance, embodied by efforts like the World Urban Forum and Mi Medellin.

Going local offers enormous opportunities to take on specific open government challenges that national governments are unable to address.  For example, open, accountable policing—this is an enormous challenge for the United States and many other countries at present, and one that can only seriously be addressed at the local level. Recent work by the Southern coalition for Social Justice in Durham, North Carolina used open data to identify patterns in police discrimination that led the city to adopt a comprehensive package of reforms aimed at addressing racial profiling. This kind of innovation deserves a global profile and opportunities to replicate at scale (in the U.S. and internationally) that only a sub-national OGP effort can provide.

The demand is there:  hundreds of governors, mayors and other local officials are knocking down OGP’s door to sign up and begin sharing their experiences and accessing new international peers and ideas.

The dilemma for Open Government Partnership is how to respond to this demand: should it advance cautiously and pilot a few city-level OGP action plans? Should it embrace this demand in a centralized fashion by increasing its staff, operations and budget to help support these new members? Or should OGP create a more distributed architecture to support these reformers and innovators at city level.

We would propose the latter approach – what we call the OGPx model, in in the spirit of the TEDx franchise – for two reasons. First, because it represents a fantastic opportunity for OGP to scale fast without compromising excessively on quality. Second, because it taps into our growing knowledge of what OGP and other governance-focused multi-stakeholder initiatives do best and – we hope – will set OGP up for future success.

Scaling fast

The genius of TEDx is that TED recognized up front that its tightly controlled central model for quality control was ill-suited to its larger ambition of seeking to grow the platform exponentially among whoever could productively use it.  By creating the franchise of TEDx, it has been able to empower hundreds of communities to make productive use of the tool locally, at a relatively comparable standard of performance, with all the benefits that come from being connected to the TED brand, but also an important measure of distance from the core enterprise. OGP’s move to the subnational level is a chance to hack the TEDx model and move from strength to strength as a global platform.

If we are looking to generate new norms of urban governance, limiting ourselves to a small number of cities at the peak of OGP’s political and social capital seems like a huge missed opportunity.  Using OGP’s current momentum to springboard a “contagion of openness” at the local level is exactly the kind of norm generation that OGP is best positioned to do at this stage, and what OGPx could help accomplish.

The lesson we’ve learned with OGP

Multilateral platforms like OGP are best at generating new norms and spurring new political commitments at scale, but struggle to deliver on implementation. This has been a central lesson from our experience founding and helping build OGP since 2010, and working with many other governance-related multi-stakeholder initiatives including the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, Open Contracting Partnership, and the Open Data Charter since. If one accepts this as a fact of life, it changes the way we calibrate expectations about what OGP can deliver, and how, at various levels of government.

OGP has completely transformed global dialogue and momentum on open, accountable, participatory governance—Goal 16 of the Sustainable Development Goals would arguably not have been possible without the ground work that OGP built, and the network of reformers willing to fight for it within the UN.  Norm generation: check.  OGP has stimulated well over 2000 commitments in almost 70 countries over the past 5 years. Stimulating political commitments at scale: check.

OGP is now mature enough to help cities pursue the same norm generation, political commitments, exchange of experiences and race to the top that we have helped seed at the national level in recent years.

How would OGPx work?

States, cities and other local entities could compete for a finite (but substantial) number of “licenses” to implement OGPx.  An application and screening process would assess the relevant locale’s track record on open governance based on an agreed standard that draws on relevant qualitative/quantitative data; locales would receive an invitation to join OGPx along with an “OGPx in a box” package that provides clear guidance and tools to begin the process of co-creating an OGPx action plan with citizens and;  participants would be asked to submit self-organized self-assessment reports that involve some measure of independent feedback, with the ability of local citizens to publicly comment on the findings (to ensure some measure of integrity, absent a fully-fledged independent reporting mechanism).

OGPx at its heart is about supporting leaders who have excellent ideas, but may not always agree or have reason to cooperate with their counterparts in the capital. For OGPx accepted participants, they should be able to develop and implement their plans within the mandates of their local authority unencumbered by requirements for national level approval.

This lighter touch, “franchised” OGPx for subnational governments would enable them to leverage OGP to drive forward ambitious open government reforms that directly improve the lives of citizens in OGP countries, in concert with international peers, and with some minimal measure of quality control and oversight—taking full advantage of the global political capital and momentum that OGP currently provides—while not overburdening OGP central, or creating unrealistic expectations about what a lean, mean OGP secretariat is capable of supporting.

OGP needs to evolve to survive. Producing new rounds of national action plans year on year, and continuing to consolidate and institutionalize the effort without paying attention to new sources of innovation and dynamism are a recipe for decreased political engagement, over-bureaucratization and eventual irrelevance. OGPx offers a chance for the initiative to reinvent itself anew for a whole new constituency of reformers and activists, who can bring fresh energy and experience to the table.

Here’s hoping that the next executive director of OGP will have the mandate to respond to fervent letters from Mayors and Governors around the world with invitations, rather than regrets.

Julie McCarthy is the Director of the Open Society Foundation’s Fiscal Governance Initiative, and was previously OGP’s founding director. Martin Tisné is Director, Policy at Omidyar Network, and a founding Steering Committee member of OGP. Together, they co-chair the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, a donor collaborative that currently holds a seat on the OGP Steering Committee.

New Tool in Fighting Corruption: Open Data

Why We Welcome the G20 Open Data Principles

Yesterday in Brisbane, the G20 threw its weight behind open data by featuring it prominently in the G20 Anti-Corruption working action plan. Specifically, the action plan calls for effort in three related areas:

1. Prepare a G20 compendium of good practices and lessons learned on open data and its application in the fight against corruption.
2. Prepare G20 Open Data Principles, including identifying areas or sectors where their application is particularly useful
3. Complete self‑assessments of G20 country open data frameworks and initiatives

Open data describes information that is not simply public, but that has been published in a manner that makes it easy to access and easy to compare and connect with other information.

This matters for anti corruption – if you are a journalist or a civil society activist investigating bribery and corruption those connections are everything. They tell you that an anonymous person (e.g. ‘Mr Smith’) who owns an obscure company registered in a tax haven is linked to a another company that has been illegally exporting timber from a neighboring country. That the said Mr. Smith is also the son-in-law of the mining minister of yet another country, who herself has been accused of embezzling mining revenues. As we have written elsewhere on this blog, investigative journalists, prosecution authorities, and civil society groups all need access to this linked data for their work.

The action plan also links open data to the wider G20 agenda, citing its impact on the ability of businesses to make better investment decisions. You can find the full detail here.

In June, we published “Open for Business: How the open data can help achieve the G20 growth target” and argued that open data cut across a number of this year’s G20 priorities: attracting private infrastructure investment, creating jobs and lifting participation, strengthening tax systems and fighting corruption.

We are delighted to see the G20 take this important next step and that open data is now on the G20 agenda for the next two years. This builds on the G8 Open Data Charter, which was announced last year during the UK G8 presidency, and is a clear indication that open data has now come of age and to the attention of heads of state across the globe.

Anti-corruption groups have been rightly advocating for the release of information on the beneficial or real owners of companies and trust. The idea is to crack down on tax evasion and corruption by identifying the actual individuals hiding behind several layers of shell companies.

But knowing that “Mr. Smith” is the owner of company X is of no interest, unless you know who Mr. Smith is.

The real interest lies in figuring out that Mr. Smith is linked to company Y, that has been illegally exporting timber from country Z, and that Mr. Smith is the son-in-law of the mining minister of yet another country, who has been accused of embezzling mining industry revenues.

For that, investigative journalists, prosecution authorities, civil society groups like Global Witness and Transparency International will need access not just to public registries of beneficial ownership but also contract data, political exposed persons databases (“PEPs” databases), project by project extractive industry data, and trade export/import data.

Unless those datasets are accessible, comparable, linked, it won’t be possible. We are talking about millions of datasets – no problem for computers to crunch, but impossible to go through manually.

This is what is different in the anti-corruption landscape today, compared to 10 years ago. Technology makes it possible. Don’t get me wrong – there are still huge, thorny political obstacles to getting the data even publicly available in the first place. But unless it is open data, I fear those battles will have been in vain.

That’s why we need open data as a topic on the G20 anti-corruption working group.