Open Government Partnership
Draft Action Plan on Open Government – we want to hear your views
November 14, 2018 by Niamh Webster 9 Comments | Category Uncategorized
Scotland’s Second National Action Plan on Open Government 2018-2020 [DRAFT] as a member of the Open Government Partnership
Today we are sharing a draft of Scotland’s Second Action Plan on Open Government to hear people’s views on it before it is published. The Action Plan includes 5 proposed commitments on improvements to openness, transparency, involving people, and accountability of public services. The Action Plan details what the Scottish Government and partners are planning to do over the next two years. It details why these changes are important, who they will work with to deliver this and when they will do this by.
This Action Plan tells the story of Open Government in Scotland, the ambitions behind it and where it sits in wider context. The Action Plan has been produced in partnership by the Scottish Government and the Scottish Open Government Network.
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We want to hear your views
We would welcome comments on this draft. Leave a comment on the blog site, or email comments to the Scottish Government Open Government Team ingage@gov.scot by the end of Tuesday 27th November, when this period for public comment will close.
Thank you for your interest and reading the draft Action Plan.
Read and download the Draft Action Plan on Open Government:
To make it easier to read, we’re sharing the Draft Action Plan which includes summaries, and a seperate document with the full detail of all the commitments.
Draft Action Plan
Detailed draft commitments
You can download both documents here:
Scotlands Open Government Action Plan 2018-20 – DRAFT – Action Plan and summaries – compressed
Scotlands Open Government Action Plan 2018-20 – DRAFT – Draft commitments in detail – compressed
More information:
Why are we sharing a draft?
Because this Action Plan has been co-created with many people involved, we wanted to share a draft of the document before it’s officially published. This includes sharing it with the people who came to public discussion events we held over the summer to get their ideas, and the Open Government Network made up of organisations and individuals. We hope there won’t be many big changes to be made at this point, as we are nearing completion and we have been working with the Open Government Network and partners to work out the detail of these commitments. The Action Plan is based on ideas we heard from the public.
Where have the ideas come from?
The ideas came from the public and have been developed by the organisations and individuals involved in Open Government Network, members of the Open Government Steering Group, public service regulators, academics, and the policy teams at the Scottish Government. This work has been done in partnership.
How did you develop the ideas?
Along with the public discussions and ideas, we have had a Steering Group meeting to get the views of the members from civil society and government. We have worked in pairings of government and civil society to develop specific actions. We’ve taken on lots of useful feedback from civil society and tried to improve the commitments based on their input. Co-creating, negociating and developing commitments is not an exact science so it was difficult to predict timings, put in place a partnership process and to communicate on-going negociations. This was the first time working in this way for all of us, so we will be reflecting on the process to try to improve it for next time. Find out more about what we’ve been doing to develop this Action Plan over the last couple of months.
What happens next?
We will listen to and try to incorporate comments in re-drafting this Action Plan, before submission to Scottish Ministers for approval and submission to the Open Government Partnership officials. We will then publish this officially, and explore other more accessible formats, towards the end of 2018, early 2019.
We will be working closely with the Network to deliver the commitments outlined over the next two years so there are plenty of opportunities to get involved. Anyone with an interest can join the network and become a member. It’s free and you can be involved as much or as little as you like.
What do you think? We want to hear your views
We would welcome views and comments on this draft Action Plan. Leave a comment on the blog site, or email comments to the Scottish Government Open Government Team ingage@gov.scot by the end of Tuesday 27th November, when this period for public comment will close. Thank you.
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Dear Niamh, thanks very much for the opportunity to comment on the draft Open Government Action Plan for 2018-2020.
My emailed comments are also available at: https://goo.gl/fvSRFR
regards
Chris Smith
Hi All.
SCVO’s response is available at https://scvo.org.uk/post/2018/11/27/scottish-open-government-draft-action-plan-2018-20
Summary:
SCVO strongly welcomes the Draft Action Plan as it helps give Open Government a home within Scottish Government
But SCVO is aware of several parts of Government that appear prepared to be much more ambitious than this plan
Some commitment milestone sections appear to still be incomplete
Some Civil society partner organisations are named as delivery partners without explanation of why they have been picked by Government
Some commitments feel like internal capacity building initiatives for Scottish Government staff
Some of the Commitments have listed activities that do not appear to deliver on the Commitment objective
Hello,
Hannah, picking up on your points on November 22nd,
e.g. ” commitment on unpicking how decisions are made and identifying points of influence within the process and how to influence these. ”
I wrote this one in August on an earlier version of OGP consultations –
https://www.ideas.gov.scot/open-government/increasing-public-trust-and-confidence-in-public-sector-decision-making
It will now be a question I think of continuing with these over the next 2 years.
Alex
Hello! Thank you for sharing this draft NAP. I’m Hera from Open Contracting Partnership. I’ve been very pleased to see the engagement from the Scottish Government as a sub-national partner. It makes me proud to see this and I’m equally delighted to be working with the rest of the Open Contracting community on the implementation of procurement transparency commitment in the last NAP.
Scotland had a strong commitment in the last NAP: “The Scottish Government will develop an open contracting strategy to support the publication of procurement and commercial reporting information in a manner that is accessible to all, while taking advantage of developing data standards.”
The strategy can be seen here: https://www.gov.scot/publications/scottish-procurement-open-contracting-strategy/
It’s excellent that the Scottish Government are also looking at ways to connect tenders, contracts, and spending which strives to have the best quality of implementation of the data standard.
This is why it was surprising that the Action Plan for 2018-2020 did not mention Scotland’s Open Contracting strategy. I have since heard that there is a new draft coming which will be mentioning that. That’s reassuring because an omission of that would have been a missed opportunity.
Based on the current draft that is online, my comments are as follows.
Procurement is only briefly mentioned under Commitment 2:
Providing a framework to support systemic change in Scottish Government to improve the way people are able to participate in open policy making and service delivery to:
“…explore how people are using procurement information, and test improved accessibility through a range of test sites”.
I believe the commitment could be made stronger by introducing the following elements:
1 – Advancing the implementation of the Open Connecting Data Standard by connecting spending, budgets and payments to contracting datasets through open, unique identifiers, creating a transparent public procurement market.
A recent article by the Herald shows that Government spending datasets are not updated regularly (https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/17238918.snp-ministers-missing-their-own-transparency-target/). Public oversight over government spending and contracts are critical for participatory budgeting, rebuilding trust and establishing a fair marketplace.
2 – Opening up implementation data as part of the procurement cycle under the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS).
This will allow the private sector and civil society to monitor the progress and impact of projects. It also creates more opportunity for innovation as more data is released into the public space. This is especially true for large, complex, multi-year public works.
3 – Creating a multi-stakeholder group with key private sector, public sector and civil society players to discuss and collaborate on public procurement targets and challenges.
As mentioned by other people, linking these goals to either KPIs or milestones and timelines would make this section much stronger and easier to monitor. I look forward to continue working with civil society, business and the Scottish Government in making the public procurement marketplace the most transparent, innovative and value-driven in the UK.
Hi Bruce, thanks for the comment and offer of help. That would be great, will email to discuss if the offer still stands. The deadline for comments is end of today, and we will provide responses to comments recieved.
Thanks
Dear Niamh, thanks very much for the opportunity to comment on the draft Open Government Action Plan for 2018-2020.
The Scottish Government’s early adoption of eProcurement for public procurement is considered to be a great success and puts Scotland in a particularly good position to adopt Open Contracting, promoted by the Open Contracting Partnership http://www.open-contracting.org. Open Contracting not only delivers significant benefits in terms of improved transparency and accountability but also provides a toolkit and framework for improving machine readable procurement data quality through the adoption of the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) http://www.open-contracting.org/data-standard.
The UK government has recently completed similar public consultations for their 2018-2020 Open Government Action Plan and has included ambitious commitments https://goo.gl/SDp4y5 concerning the adoption of Open Contracting and OCDS with 2 of the 8 OGP commitments, dedicating 7 pages, to Open Contracting (Commitment 5 – Open Contracting: Local Engagement and Data Use Commitment 6: Open Contracting Data).
Scotland’s Open Government Action Plan for 2016-2017 contained the following commitment:“4. The Scottish Government will develop an open contracting strategy to support the publication of procurement and commercial reporting information in a manner that is accessible to all, while taking advantage of developing data standards”.
The Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM):Scotland Final Report 2017 highlighted good progress in some areas of this action plan including the publication of the strategy and the Scottish Government has been working closely with the Open Contracting Partnership. As a result, Scotland is one of the first countries in Europe to publish procurement notice data in XML, JSON and Excel format in OCDS and provide APIs on the Public Contracts Scotland website:
https://www.publiccontractsscotland.gov.uk/NoticeDownload/Download.aspx
The Scottish Government’s Report of Public Discussion Events and Engagement for the new strategy included consultations on the theme of: “financial transparency – understanding the flow of money, transparency around procurement processes, accessible and understandable explanation of budgets and expenditure…”
The report captured stakeholder feedback that:
“There is a need for more transparency on procurement processes for contracts.
With greater appreciation of impact on the supply chain and maximising opportunities for small to medium sized businesses.
There needs to be more awareness built of the Planning process and practical steps for citizen intervention in it.
Should be openness about why decisions on procurement and planning are made and about who benefits and who may not benefit from these”.
The draft Action Plan for 2018-2020 makes no mention of any of the above or Open Contracting and procurement is only mentioned once under Commitment 2 – Providing a framework to support systemic change in Scottish Government to improve the way people are able to participate in open policy making and service delivery to:
“..explore how people are using procurement information, and test improved accessibility through a range of test sites”.
Scottish Procurement published a comprehensive 14 page Open Contracting Strategy in September 2017 with a number of work streams around open contracting and OCDS and in particular commitments that ”Open data standards will be built into applicable systems including open APIs, allowing us to reach the 4 star level on the OCDS” and “Specifying, building and maintaining an Open Contracting portal”.
I would like to suggest that as Open Contracting can have such a transformative impact on Open Government and public procurement in Scotland going forward, the 2018-2020 plan should build on Scotland’s significant achievements to date and have a specific and challenging commitment to delivering much more Open Contracting and specifically to::
a. Implement the outstanding actions in the Open Contracting Strategy e.g.;
(i) Specifying, building and maintaining an Open Contracting portal;
(ii) Achieving the 4 star level on the OCDS (tender, award & contract data structured with unique identifiers & classifications in JSON).
b. Update the Open Contracting Strategy to cover the period of the action plan;
c. Publish each month on the Scottish Government website (and the new Open contracting portal when available) details of all contracts over £25,000 in PDF /CSV/XML format.
It would also seem to fit better under Commitment 1. Financial and Performance Transparency and would be good to also include a reference to the planned Open Contracting Portal and OCDS under Commitment 3. Improvements to the way information/data is used.
As the Scottish Government spends over £11bn a year on public procurement I suggest it deserves an acknowledgement in the new OGP that improving accountability and transparency for public procurement through the adoption of Open Contracting is a key component of Scotland’s Open Government Action Plan. In view of its importance, it would be great if a separate commitment could be added to the existing 5 commitments to cover Open Contracting and implementation of the Open Contracting Strategy so that it receives similar prominence to other recently published draft OGP plans.
It would be a shame if Scotland’s next OGP Plan didn’t include ambitious, specific and measurable commitments concerning Open Contracting and OCDS. I’m afraid a single sentence doesn’t do it justice in view of the importance of transparent and accountable public procurement to Scotland’s:
Citizens – developing greater confidence in the government’s ability to spend their tax payers money wisely, fairly, efficiently and transparently;
Private sector – encouraging positive economic development by making it easier for Scottish firms to win more contracts;
Government – providing the basis for achieving significant savings by increasing collaboration between buyers as open contracting opens up information previously locked within government silos, spreadsheets etc, as well as publicly.
Embedding feedback loops within the public procurement environment so citizens, private sector, civil society and government departments can feedback and collaborate on challenges to drive value-based public procurement.
I also suggest including the Open Contracting Partnership in the list of CSOs, private sector, multilaterals, working groups in the Commitment 1: Financial and Performance Transparency and Commitment 3: Improvements to the way information/data is used.
Thanks again for the opportunity to comment and look forward to seeing the final version.
Regards
Chris Smith
Thanks for the opportunity to comment.
I have emailed a document with my observations.
In the spirit of openness, I have also posted these on our blog (as they are too long to input as a comment here). You can read them at https://codethecity.co.uk/2018/11/25/response-to-scotlands-draft-action-plan-on-open-government/
Niamh and colleagues,
Thanks for all your hard work on this – it’s been great to see collaboration done so well and openly. My comments are based on the summary doc only – I’ll try and read the full one before 27th!
The simplicity of the way each commitment is articulated i.e. what issue are we trying to address, what are we going to do and how will this activity address the issue is great. I know FOI is covered more in depth elsewhere but I think the document could be more overt about the important roles that FOI and the Local Governance Review and the Lobbying database play in Open Government; and specifically call for more explicit links/reference to be made in between all 4 ‘things’.
In addition to the financial decision making and accountability threads I’d really like to see a commitment on unpicking how decisions are made and identifying points of influence within the process and how to influence these.
Are there any measurements or indicators of impact/success? (apologies if these are only within the in depth document) A natural continuation of the what are we trying to address – what will we do – how would this address the issue is a 4th: ‘how will we know if we’ve succeeded’ and would round the work off neatly.
One final minor point is that the actions in Commitment 1 and ‘how will that solve the problem’ only link to the new powers / SNIB / Scottish Exchequer and don’t – I feel – adequately demonstrate what you’re going to do to address the first part of the commitment on giving more information to the public on how the Government uses public money.
Overall I think it’s really succinct and understandable…but a few things to tighten up, particularly the one about measuring impact/success.
Thanks.
Naimh and colleagues
Thank you for ‘pre-sharing’ this. I hope to find mental energy to comment on the content in the next few days – is there a deadline?
Meanwhile, I suggest that some the following illustrations are too small: foot of page 2, top of page 8, page 23, page 27 (both photos), page 28. I’d be happy to give a second draft and ex-publisher’s once-over.
All the best
Bruce