What happened in the OKF Ireland world last week you ask? Where do we fit in the Irish open data, transparency, accountability and citizen participation debate? – You have come to the right place to find out.
We are trialing a new form of weekly updates where we aim to keep you posted and highlight what we found interesting, impressive, disappointing, exciting, and so on. All of these will usually be related to projects that we are currently working on. – Commenting encouraged.
Exciting …!
Denis on our team is working tiredly to organise the Civil Society Day as a fringe event to the official European Regional OGP Conference that takes place 8-9th May. More info coming in the next weeks, but it looks to be a great networking evening with topical & focussed 15 min talks.
Interesting …
William Beaussang the Head of the Government Reform Unit and part of our weekly joint working group meetings with DPER has written a piece on Ireland’s OGP journey. Here is the link to the blog post on the OGP website where you can actually comment. They won’t let you comment on their own press release.
Disappointing!
Department of Public Expenditure and Reform have told us they do not have time to research best practices around introducing programming and coding as compulsory in our schools. First of all – thanks for letting us know that there is no time to research citizen requirements! Second of all, AND MORE IMPORTANTLY – what the heck?! There’s a tech revolution going on and Ireland doesn’t want to take the chance to jump on the band wagon now? The UK are doing it from September this year. Estonia is teaching its 7- year olds for years!!
Appointments – always free to attend if interested
1/4/2014 – Weekly meeting with the OGP civil society group. 3/4/2014 – weekly meeting of the joint working group to draft Ireland’s 1st OGP Action Plan. 5/4/2014 – Meeting with OGP Conference planning group. Don’t worry – we’ll have all of those covered if you don’t fancy 3 meetings a week. We keep reminding people to utilize ‘The Online’ – but the change is slow or non-existent. 5/4/2014& 9/4/2014 – Meetings with Dept.s of Environment and Justice.
OGP Action Plan
[27/3/2014] We had our 7th meeting with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER) to discuss the latest draft of the OGP Action Plan which the civil society group had consolidated the Tuesday beforehand. Still very much work in progress but DPER has agreed to continue their work and flesh out the commitments under consideration of the comments made by citizens which you can see in the draft. All DPER Action Points from the meeting of the joint working group.
[25/3/2014] We also met with other OGP ninjas at our weekly civil society meeting. Our notes.
What’s on our Reading List
Flora: Working on an open letter to Minister Howlin asking to drop FOI fees – so it’s been all about FOI last week. Says it all – The letter sent to Minister Howlin by Access Info Europe & the Center of Law and Democracy last year after reading this and this.
Denis: 14-Year-Old Proves U.S. Can Save $370 Million by Changing Fonts. He also read How to ensure #opendata policies are being implemented w/ the public interest in mind? Enter the Open Data Ombudsman
Salua: There is only one problem… to old (2010) …but really interesting! Salua also talks about the Civil Society Day we told you about earlier on her own blog – little bit more info than what we have given you above!
Weekly Twitter Snapshot