Request for Proposal: Website Development – Open Government Partership

(Editor: This is posted on behalf of the Open Government Partnership which, as noted below, needs a website.)

Download printable .DOC version.

ALSO SEE UPDATED VENDOR Q&A AS OF MAY 25 2011

This Request for Proposal is open to all. All vendors will have the opportunity to share written questions before the submission due date, and answers to all questions will be shared with all vendors. Please confirm your intent to bid via email to Julie McCarthy ( julie.mccarthy {at} transparency-initiative.com ) by June 1, 2011.  No publicity or news releases pertaining to this RFP, responses to this RFP, and discussions of any kind related to this RFP, or the award of any contract related to the bid document, may be released without the prior written approval of OGP. Respondents will absorb all costs incurred in the preparation and presentation of an RFP.

OBJECTIVE

Create and build a constituency-focused, visually compelling and dynamic online presence to support the growth of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) as a prominent international forum for driving reform and innovation around transparency, accountability and citizen participation in governance.  

OGP seeks to create an online presence that connects the organization to current and potential government participants, cultivates knowledge exchange and ongoing conversation among open government practitioners in all fields, and inspires new partnerships across the public, private and non-profit sectors.  The site seeks to drive core constituencies to populate site content themselves (e.g. through self-addition to the OGP directory, posting of case studies, analysis and comments) in addition to OGP pro-actively generating content.  The online home for OGP clearly demonstrates the value of transparency, accountability and citizen participation through its design, functionality and platform.

OGP seeks a vender with strong experience cultivating online community engagement, as well as marketing and editorial experience with public and/or non-profit sector initiatives.

BACKGROUND

OGP was born in January 2011 when a group of governments and civil society organizations gathered for an informal brainstorming meeting to discuss the possibility of launching an international multi-stakeholder initiative around open government. The idea was to capitalize on growing global momentum around transparency, accountability and participation in public sector governance, and find a means to strengthen and increase the visibility of these new norms.

The result is the Open Government Partnership, is a new multi-stakeholder coalition of leading governments and civil society organizations working to advance transparency and accountability in government – with the goals of securing concrete commitments from countries to increase the responsiveness of government to citizens, counter corruption, promote economic efficiencies, harness innovation and improve the delivery of services.

A diverse coalition of governments will gather in New York, on the margins of the UN General Assembly in September 2011, for the launch of the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The nine founding governments (Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States) will embrace a set of high-level open government principles, pledge country-specific commitments for putting the principles into practice, and invite civil society organizations to assess their individual and collective progress going forward.  The OGP steering committee will also welcome the commitment of a broader group of governments to join a six-month process of developing their own country-specific commitments. These governments will announce their OGP commitments and add their signatures to the OGP declaration of principles in March 2012.  In its first year, OGP expects upwards of 80 countries from around the globe to join OGP, including in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and North America.

One of OGP’s more innovative features is its Networking Mechanism, which will connect countries with low-cost/no-cost expertise in open government fields where they seek to make new commitments and reforms.   The mechanism will be run by a dedicated team of experts that will spend June 2011-March 2012 working to partner OGP participating governments with innovative private sector and non-profit entities willing to share their ideas, technologies and platforms to engage and empower citizens in OGP countries. Profiling and tracking the public-private partnerships seeded by this mechanism is an important priority. The mechanism will be based at the same organization that hosts the OGP web manager, facilitating the timely and continuing transfer of networking activity and new projects and partnerships into web updates in or near real time.

The initiative is overseen by an 18-member International Steering Committee that includes the nine founding governments and nine leading civil society organizations from Brazil, India, Kenya, Mexico, Tanzania and the United States.  The United States and Brazil are co-chairs of OGP in year one, and their work is supported on a daily basis by a full time senior advisor provided by the TAI donor collaborative.

OGP is supported by foundation grants from a collaborative of leading governance donors called the Transparency and Accountability Initiative (TAI), as well as financial and in-kind contributions from participating governments and the private sector.

The OGP is young, lean, innovative, visionary and technologically savvy initiative working globally to promote transparency, fight corruption, energize civic engagement and leverage new technologies to increase governments’ responsiveness to citizens’ concerns.

WEBSITE

The website required is for OGP  (opengovpartnership.org).  OGP seeks to inform visitors about how to participate in the OGP process, inspire visitors towards new and better practices by learning about the innovations and experiences of OGP participants, and enable an ongoing conversation among OGP collaborators (government officials, local and international civil society, the private sector, intergovernmental organizations) about the progress and challenges of OGP implementation at the country level.  The website is the main forum for communicating government commitments under OGP and for disseminating independent assessment reports intended to hold governments accountable for these commitments.   The website also informs the general public about OGP activities and serves as a connection point to citizen level resources around open government.

The OGP site must provide a credible, stable image that reflects the dual governmental and civil society nature of this initiative and the main audiences for this website.  Given OGP’s close connection to the open data/knowledge movements and the need to ‘practice what we preach’ the site must be built on an open source platform and reflect the values that OGP embodies (openness, transparency and responsiveness) at every opportunity. Open exchange among all OGP constituencies (governments, civil society, private sector and other) is a hallmark of the site.

AUDIENCES

• Current and future OGP participating governments and civil society
• Influencers, experts, government leaders/agency heads around the globe, especially in all OGP participating countries

• Civil society organizations working on issues of transparency, accountability and participation around the globe, especially in all OGP participating countries
• Private sector and not-for-profit actors working to apply new technology and other methodologies towards increasing public sector transparency, accountability and participation

• Media
• The private foundation and multi and bilateral donor community

USER SCENARIOS

Use Case 1: Government Official from Potential OGP Participating Country

Chun is a senior official at the South Korean Ministry of Finance who was recently asked by the President to explore the possibility of South Korea joining the Open Government Partnership (OGP). Chun wants to go on the website and learn exactly what OGP’s mission is and how the initiative came about. He wants to read through the declaration of principles and easily share it with other members of government to determine if it is something they want to sign on to. He wants to identify which governments are leading the OGP, which countries are currently implementing OGP (with a special focus on Asia), and what other civil society organizations and private sector partners are involved. He wants to understand what the incentives for participating in OGP are, and why other countries have chosen to do so.   Chun wants to identify what the minimal criteria for participation in OGP are, how South Korea performs on these criteria, and what additional steps, if any, South Korea needs to take to meet these criteria.   Chun wants to find a step-by-step explanation of what the process for implementing OGP involves. He wants to see specific examples of country commitments, and be able to sort through them based on areas of interest to the South Korean government. Chun wants to learn more about how the OGP Networking and Exchange Mechanism works and what some of the partnerships it has created between governments and private sector/non-profit actors look like, specifically in Asia. He also wants to understand what the Independent Assessment Mechanism is, who is involved and when the independent assessment would take place.  Chun wants to learn what civil society organizations from his own country have been involved to date, if any.  After he has found all of this information, he wants to print out a one page OGP fact sheet for his President that includes: a one paragraph description of OGP, a list of OGP Steering Committee members and other OGP participating countries, and a graphic illustration of the South Korea’s performance on the OGP criteria for participation. Chun also wants to be able to share with the OGP community what his government is already doing on open government, through submitting a short case study focused on their new mobile monitoring platform for health service delivery in rural areas.

Use Case 2: Civil Society Expert from OGP Participating Country

Gloria is the executive director of a non-profit organization that works to promote public sector transparency and accountability in Zambia. She recently learned from a Government press release that Zambia has signed on to participate in OGP and already made a series of commitments around increasing citizen participation in service delivery, improving access to information and strengthening anti-corruption legislation. Gloria wants to go onto the website and read about Zambia’s OGP commitments in detail. She wants to share these commitments with her NGO colleagues via social networking sites to raise awareness about Zambia’s participation in OGP.  She wants to know exactly who within the Zambian government is responsible for OGP implementation so that she can contact them. Under the access to information commitment, Gloria wants to post a recent analysis that her organization conducted of the government’s access to information program that contains specific recommendations for improving Zambia’s performance here. Gloria wants to identify other governments that have made commitments in the same sub-fields (service delivery, access to information, anti-corruption) and compare Zambia’s commitments to theirs. She wants to see what other African countries have made OGP commitments in the same areas as Zambia, and which civil society groups are working to support and monitor their governments here.  She wants to understand how the Networking and Exchange Mechanism works and see which private and non-profit actors the mechanism has paired the government of Zambia up with to date. She wants to see in what other countries these same private sector/non-profit actors are also undertaking OGP partnerships. Gloria wants to suggest a number of additional private sector and NGO actors doing work in Zambia, Namibia and Ghana that may be relevant to what the government is trying to accomplish on service delivery. She wants to add her organization to the OGP Network Directory and list the various issues on which they work, and where.  Gloria wants to learn more about the independent assessment mechanism and how she can get in touch with the people who will be involved in assessing Zambia. Gloria also wants to be able to locate her country’s own OGP website and view other country’s OGP sites.

Use Case 3: Casual User (informed citizen, business owner)

Andy lives in the Silicon Valley and works at a startup. He’s a heard a lot of buzz around “open government” and “transparency” and recently heard about a new global partnership for open data sharing. He is wondering how his data and file sharing startup might be able to play a role in this movement but needs to find out more about the partnership. He goes to the website and is able to find a lot of enlightening information about what the partnership intends to do and how it is already making progress. He walks away with a clear sense of the program from its quick descriptions and easy to understand visualizations about the value of country by country data and what it could mean, both for his business and for the industry as a whole. He finds a place to add himself as a potential vendor for the networking and exchange mechanism to consider. Overall he is pretty impressed with the clean layout and nice interface design that most public sector projects just don’t seem to have. He leaves thinking there is a competent team working on this project and looks forward to being a part of it.

REQUIREMENTS

v1

Objective: Get countries to sign onto OGP, and get core audiences to add themselves to OGP online network and share knowledge related to OGP country commitments

Content Management and Distribution [Social Media Strategy]

• All core site content and language will be created by OGP and is not the vendor’s responsibility. The vendor will work with a single point of contact designated by OGP and a main point of contact on the vendor side will also be required.
• Overall design that highlights relevant content (e.g. core OGP background documents, in depth description of key elements like the  OGP networking mechanism, steering committee, etc…and country commitments from the nine steering committee countries)
• OGP Summit/website launch strategy. The OGP website launch will coincide with the September 2011 OGP summit on the margins of the UN General Assembly in NY, when OGP will first be introduced on the world stage.   We need a website launch strategy geared specifically towards online engagement, real-time feedback and participation around the summit, which will involve approximately 80 governments and 80 NGOs, experts and bloggers as well as private sector open government leaders, etc…gathering in NY for two days of OGP related events.  Emphasis on finding creative ways to use the site as a means to engage present/future OGP participating countries that cannot be there and want to participate remotely.
• Supports social media
• Development of Community Engagement Strategy (see section on this below)
• Ongoing editorial content and website curation strategies that address the following questions:
• How do we update the core brochure content of the site?
• How do we pull in/push out content in real time to/from the broader open government community and highlight other leading voices in the field?

Functional

• The site should be highly usable and unintimidating for non-web-savvy visitors and visitors connected at low speeds (e.g. no flash, javascript, etc..).
• Basic directory functionality-strong call to community (governments, civil society, the private sector) to add themselves to online OGP network/directory with relevant tags around key topics, work they have done and where on open government issues
• Core audiences (government, civil society and private sector) are able to share case studies/examples of most innovative open government work they are doing in a specific template/form. The best examples are curated by OGP Web Manager based on transparent guidelines (innovative, OGP relevant, unique example) and posted by in a designated section of the site (a relevant example is http://transparency.globalvoicesonline.org/suggest-case-study).
• Posting and relevant tagging of country commitments by issue area and region
• Development and execution of strategy on how to get the most useful comments/structured feedback from core-audiences around key site content. The goal is to generate audience comments/inputs that interact with site content and react to each other, while helping OGP create more shared collective knowledge about open government practice and the initiative itself. The strategy should include means for audience members to post links to related projects and documents in addition to comments.   Content that will initially will be subject of comments during v1 includes:
• OGP country commitments
• Case studies posted in the networking and directory portion of site
• Blogs—ideally the site will have multiple original blog contributions per week (from regular open data bloggers, as well local/international NGOs and foundations, national/local government leaders from an OGP country, etc…) and could also potentially aggregate content from other sources.   We want to the blogs to provoke comments and generate learning among interested experts in OGP participating countries.

Technical

• It should be UTF-8 compliant
• Technology stack recommendations: Our preference is for a LAMP stack, but we are open to other proposals.
• Core site content will be translated into key languages (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese) ahead of time.
• Open Source software and a CMS system are also required, including admin tools for featuring and highlighting selected content
• Built in cross-posting to social media and quick import/ export functions
• Backup and recovery approach.
• Testing and QA procedures
• Documentation standards
• Hosting recommendations

v2

Objective: Launch website, and increase networking and exchange among existing and new OGP countries and participants (government, civil society and private sector) during and after the September Summit

Content Management and Distribution [Social Media Strategy]

• OGP Summit/website launch implementation
• Strategy for how to best highlight successes and successful partnerships – both new and old? (video, photos, touts, or?)

• Library of open gov sites and monitoring initiatives, including video library of relevant open government speeches and expert talks
• Social and Traditional: ideas for addressing promotion of the website through traditional, digital, search and social media. How could we integrate social media into the design of the website to make things more dynamic and help grow the community through content?

Functional

• Execution of OGP website launch around September 2011 Summit
• Expansion of Networking mechanism section beyond directory to enable OGP Networking Team to post and highlight relevant content and populate the site with relevant data on OGP partnerships and expert profiles they are collecting
• Execution of commenting strategy beyond country commitments/case studies to include other core site content, such as:
• Independent analysis of/briefings on OGP implementation programs by civil society, media, government or others
• Other open government-related news, developments and emerging innovations in OGP participating countries
• New OGP partnerships launched in participating countries by the OGP Networking and Exchange Mechanism
• Engagement strategy for the research community around open government to enable them to share related ongoing research/evidence on the impact of open government.
• Website analytics methodology and approach drawing upon free existing resources
• Tools for new participants to join the process in localized and accessible manner (e.g. sample press releases, model commitment template, sortability of online network directory by region and issue, etc..)
• Development of Data Visualization Strategy:  given OGP’s infancy, there are still a lot of questions around what kind of commitments governments will make, how OGP and third party entities (such as the independent assessment mechanism and civil society) will monitor and track them, and what kinds of information or data are going to be used/generated to track progress.   Until this large number of unknowns becomes clearer over the next 3-6 months, it is difficult to identify the problems and possible solutions that data visualization might entail.  

At this stage, we can envision a few meta-level scenarios for how data/sourcing will play out:

1. We use tools internal to the site to draw in public input around OGP commitment development and implementation, have a tightly integrated set of internal tracking tools that are specifically focused on managing and synthesizing information coming out of country commitments, on the ground progress reports from stakeholders involved, independent assessment reports and other source data

2. Have a completely independent external platform tracking commitments and their progress, possibly using third party platforms (e.g. Document Cloud) and use an API or something else to pull results from platform to site, create some kind of standalone publication/collection of documents to house this set of stuff and a mechanism (e.g. researcher, NGO, etc…) to generate data

While we welcome all ideas on strategy for visual treatment of country  commitments and performance tracking tools in v1, until this piece becomes  clearer we want to carve it out for the first round of site development  and being plugging it into v2 and v3 when have sufficient clarity on key components.

Technical

• Site should support multiple languages, including non-Roman languages such as Hindi, Bahasa, Arabic and Russian.
• Built-in IA/localization features to support translations associated with selected pages.
• Third party products or service recommendations and associated budget for any additional suggestions outside of vendor capabilities
• Site maintenance approach

v3

Objective: Implement a data visualization strategy that creates tools here to view country commitments, compare content by issue area and download or share the data from third party monitoring efforts around OGP implementation.

Content Management and Distribution [Social Media Strategy]

• Tools to share content generated by data visualization strategy through social media outlets

Functional

• Implementation of Data Visualization Strategy
• Further expansion of Networking Mechanism portion of site to potentially track implementation progress of OGP partnerships created by the mechanism over time
• Community engagement strategy for OGP Independent Assessment Mechanism reports, which will be published in 2013, and be the first systematic third-party evaluation of OGP country performance on commitment implementation

Technical

• Mobile site interface or WAP readable website for low bandwidth regions.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY   

We want the OGP online community to evoke a “race to the top” dynamic that implicitly spurs governments to perform better and CSOs to push further on open government by providing a space that inspires people to learn, share and partner.  We seek advice on how to facilitate the development of an OGP network of government officials, civil society and private sector actors, researchers and multi-lateral agencies that can exchange information and build new knowledge and relationships around open government activity in their countries.  The strategy should involve strong calls directed at core audiences to join/add themselves to the network directory, and share the work that they are doing and its relevance to OGP in structured formats.  

A key priority is finding creative and visually compelling ways to highlight members of the network as they add themselves to the directory, and to profile new partnerships and learning generated through the online case study submissions and the OGP Networking and Exchange Mechanism.

There are a number of specific opportunities in OGP’s near-term lifecycle where we want to generate engagement.

Examples:

• In September 2011, the nine founding OGP countries will post their individual OGP commitments/action plans on the OGP website.
• In September 2011 for the 9 founding OGP governments, and in March 2011 for approximately 70 additional governments, OGP countries will begin implementing their commitments.   A large number of NGOs, bloggers, academics and interested citizens at the local and international level will be following this process closely, and we want to find ways to for the site to engage them and capture the knowledge and analysis they are generating.
• We are also interested in ideas on how to engage the nascent OGP community in select aspects of the website’s creation itself. We want to be respectful of our community’s time, but also want to give core audiences the chance to participate and make aspects of the site better and stronger where relevant (e.g. logo competitions, or possibly ideas on how to structure commitment feedback or the network directory most effectively…).

VISUAL/TONE

Transparency and progress towards it are most easily viewed in visual formats and this will be key to the website design. The site should be extremely dynamic and rapidly reflect innovations and real time information.

The UI and the visual design of the website must be as clear, easily navigable, and as sharply designed as possible.  The fact that this is an international project should also be considered in the design, UI and persistent website elements.  Options to display information visually often counter the problem of internationalization – as charts, maps and data visualization make it easy and enjoyable to share information.

The visual tone should reflect openness and should inspire participation, while conveying technological and resource know-how. The website should not be intimidating in any way, or text heavy.  

Logo / branding work is being conducted from now until June 15th, and we do not expect the final look/feel to be generated until the vendor has received and reviewed the final branding. The vendor is also free to submit logo/branding ideas.

An informal poll of experts involved with OGP revealed the following sampling of sites we like (and why):

http://www.criik.com/dev/home/apps
(user friendly visual catalogue of open government-focused apps/websites)

http://data.worldbank.org/   
(Data Visualization, content easily sortedby country, topic or sub-indicator, rotating visual headline highlighting new/important site content, for developers area)

http://www.niot.org/
(design, niceincorporation of data visualization, video, news, blog, social media, action, learning, etc… incorporates many elements without feeling cluttered or overwhelming)

http://transparency.globalvoicesonline.org/
(mission, approach to case studies/interviews with innovators)

http://civiccommons.org/
(mission, tone)

http://www.gapminder.org/
(approach, aimed at welcoming non-experts, user friendly access to data, video library, highlights tools for particular audiences –e.g. teachers)

http://sunlightfoundation.com/ 
(mission, tone)

http://www.data.gov/  
(tone, approach, mission, user-friendly, focus on communities, catalogue of open data sites/progress of movement, tool/data/geo-data catalogues, in the news section to highlight momentum)   

/ 
(mission, tone, audience-oriented features (pressroom, toolkits, etc…)   

http://manorlabs.org/       
(mission, approach, design, innovation/ideas market, emphasis on community engagement and vocabulary used to organize it,, e.g. submit ideas on how we can do things better, review and comment on proposed solutions, etc..

CHALLENGES

The site needs to embody the fundamental principles of transparency that it promotes, including making the site open source, the content open license and all data machine-readable, visually stimulating and easy to access at all levels of connectivity.

There is already substantial “buzz” about OGP within governmental, civil society and private sector circles that we want to build on.  

There may be confusion regarding the distinction between the international OGP and President Obama’s domestic Open Government Initiative (http://www.whitehouse.gov/open) that must be overcome.  Both casual and savvy visitors to the website would also need to walk away with a clear understanding of OGP’s relationships with partner organizations.

The website must convey a strong sense of momentum around the open government accomplishments of early OGP participants, as well as aspirations towards more ambitious innovations and commitments among these and other countries going forward.

The website must be available in multiple languages and planned for internationalization at launch.

The incentives to participate in OGP are not monetary—rather participants are driven by the desire to establish a strong reputation on open government practices internationally, to increase economic efficiency and public trust at home, and to access new partners and learning opportunities in the open government field. The website must be a powerful vehicle for highlighting these incentives among potential OGP participants – either through example projects and successes, or through media, video and storytelling or other means.

The proposed long-term editorial management of such a community also needs to be considered and we expect to hire a full-time OGP web-manager with strong editorial/site curation experience in addition to technical capacities.

We must complete the development of the new site by September, 2011.  The deadline is aggressive but necessary in order to seize upcoming opportunities:
   

• The OGP launch summit on the margins of the UN General Assembly from September 19-20, 2011
• The availability of senior governmental leaders, NGOs, bloggers and private sector leaders to conduct outreach on behalf of OGP in September 2011

RESPONSE TO RFP (75 page limit)

Please include the following in response to this RFP:

• Statement of qualifications and relevant experience.  Describe the process utilized and goals achieved in prior work
• Proposed team structure, bios and prior experience for those assigned to work on OGP and in what capacity.
• Proposed staff plan and rate sheet for the duration of the project (broken into phases).
• Statement or Analysis demonstrating the understanding of competitive and complementary landscape in open source, open government and civic transparency and accountability fields
• Statement of unique strengths and ability to address the unique needs outlined here
• Statement of timeliness – examples of short turn around time to achieve relevant assignments and process to be used to meet timeline required here
• Recommended approach to website including timeline for milestones, interim and final deliverables and branding if opting in for that.
• Statement of prior community engagement strategy and implementation work, including prior use of online competitions/events, resource-mapping, and other online community building tools
• Statement of methodology to include:
• Engaging staff, partners, donors, others to provide input
• Project team and staff plan, including resumes
• Relevant samples and descriptions of past websites and creative and technical execution, ideally with relevance to open government-related project
• Examples of data visualization from other projects

 SPECIFIC INFORMATION REQUESTED

• Company name, address, phone, website
• Office to serve this account plus any additional offices
• Primary contact
• Date founded, principals, officers, ownership information
• Representative client listing
• Listing of clients where any potential conflict of interest may arise including technology and government contracts
• Listing of up to five RELEVENT contracts COMPLETED in the past twelve months and
• Client Name and Address
• Dollar Value of Project
• Period of Performance
• Description of the Project Deliverables (300 Words)
• Samples such as Screenshots of System and/or other deliverables
• What staff on this project are proposed to be involved in OGP project?
• Were all deliverables provided under budget? – if not explain.
• Provide indicators of success, such as client comments, user metrics, market statistics and/or social buzz
• Reference contact information
• Capability in social media and statement of relevant work
• Estimated fees for assignment – total and incremental.  Pricing should be done on a project basis with staff time estimates.  
• Contract information for two references
• Development Schedule for v1 of the website

APPROXIMATE TIMELINE FOR SELECTION & NOTIFICATION& KEY v1 DELIVERABLES

May 20, 2011  —  Deadline for Receipt of Questions Regarding RFP

May 25, 2011  —  Answers to all questions will be shared with all bidders

June 1, 2011   —  Submissions Due by 4pm PST

June 2-8, 2011  —  Finalist Interviews

June 10, 2011  —  Vendor Selected

June 14, 2011  —  Contract Executed & Project Commences

June 15-16, 2011  —  Initial Meeting with OGP team

June 24, 2011  —  Delivery of finalized development schedule for v1

July 20, 2011  —  Delivery of site mock-ups and initial concepts due

July 22, 2011  —  Approved Design begins production

August 2011  —  Launch of Beta System, User Testing/Validation by OGP

Sept 9, 2011   —  All v1 Deliverables Due, including system documentation

September 10, 2011 onwards  —  Site Maintenance, roll out and testing

December 2011   —  All v2 Deliverables Due

April 2011  —  All v3 Deliverables Due

RESPONSE

Please submit response to The Transparency and Accountability Initiative by May 18 [typo] June 1, 2011 as follows:

PDF to Julie McCarthy ( julie.mccarthy { at } transparency-initiative.com )

Early submissions are highly encouraged.

Appendix I. OGP Country Commitments

In general, we expect OGP country commitments to increase transparency, accountability and participation in governance to fall under the following categories:

1. Improving public service delivery (health, education, water, etc…)
2. More effectively managing public resources (budgets, extractive industries, aid, other natural resources)
3. Increasing public faith in government (access to information, open data, asset disclosure, campaign finance reform, etc…)
4. Improving the climate for economic growth (anti-corruption, e-governance initiatives, innovation competitions/plaforms)
5. Creating safer communities (disaster response and prevention, public safety, electoral violence

Appendix II: OGP Data Generation Timeline

The OGP will generate a range of new data periodically over the next 6-24 months that will become the subject of community discussion and debate among government and civil society actors, and also provide an information resource for international and country-level researchers to analyze and compare across issue areas and countries. Data “baskets” will include:

• September 2011: Detailed Country Commitments/OGP Action Plans from 9 Steering Committee Countries that should be searchable and visualizable by issue area (e.g. access to information, anti-corruption, budgets, extractives, open data, etc…), country/region, and potentially timeline (e.g. governments will be committing to accomplishing certain commitments within 90 days, 180 days, etc…)
• March 2012: Detailed Country Commitments/ OGP Action Plans from 50-70 additional countries, that will require the same sorting, searchability and visualization tools as described above
• February 2012-December 2012: local and international civil society commentary and analysis (both formal, in terms of reports, briefs, blogs, etc…at country/intl level and informal in terms of offhand citizen comments) on country implementation performance against OGP commitments
• January-March 2013: Detailed independent assessment reports for all OGP implementing countries from an international group of experts assessing how each government has performed with respect to its commitments.