To close the gap between the production of official statistics and their dissemination and use, development partners and funders need a better understanding of the barriers that national statistical offices (NSO) face. To assist the modernization of statistical systems, it is equally important to analyze usage statistics from national data portals and NSO websites.

Open Data Watch, AidData, and PARIS21 have collaborated to address these needs in an exciting two-part research study, with financial support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Join us December 6th for an engaging discussion about the report’s findings and implications for the future of official statistics for sustainable development. We’ll hear reactions from leaders that fund, produce, promote, and use official statistics in their work.

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You are invited to join for our 3rd Annual Mapathon at Open Gov Hub, to learn about how we can collectively improve the delivery of health and other key public services through citizen mapping, feedback and participation.

The Open Geospatial Data Center for Health (OpenDCH) project, supported by PEPFAR, uses mapping to better analyze the most HIV-prone communities in Cote d'Ivoire, and to close gaps in HIV testing and treatment. This Mapathon will support OpenDCH and build upon our previous Mapathons, giving us all the opportunity to make a difference for Annual World AIDS Day (on Dec 1st).

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Join for the latest installment in our ongoing Democracy Dialogues series. What have successful efforts looked like to curb the influence of money in politics and institute effective campaign finance reforms, both in the US and around the world? Specifically, how have citizen efforts helped ensure that certain candidates commit to be transparent about where their money comes from and/or encouraged them to implement other anti-corruption related reforms once in office?
Join Open Gov Hub, Sunlight Foundation, Transparency International, and Global Integrity in this global panel looking at trends in this issue and suggestions for the American context.

Refreshments will be served.

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Led by new Hub member Blake Ratner of Collaborating for Resilience, join us for this BBL. Launching governance innovations and making them stick requires creativity, persistence, and a robust model for thinking about how multi-stakeholder dynamics work, how to navigate conflict, and how to catalyze collective action. Come for an introduction to principles for building effective multi-stakeholder dialogue, and share the challenges you or your organization face. Suitable for practitioners working on any dimension of civil society engagement, public policy, and governance reform.

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Are you tired of attending boring panel discussions, power point presentations, and engaging in many working groups with the hope of learning something from your peers but in the end getting very little out of it? Working groups, although beneficial, are only worth it if done right.  Come and learn how to facilitate effective peer learning by watching and hearing from Wayan Vota, the architect of TechSalon (and former Open Gov Hubber) who has flipped the idea of working groups on its head by introducing a unique technique and model for facilitating effective peer learning.

This is the fourth in the Storytelling for Social Impact workshop series for members. 

Come hungry: we'll be serving up waffles! RSVP now, as spots are limited to 30. Non hub members can request to attend anyone of these workshops by emailing yeukai.mukorombindo@globalintegrity.org

Do you blog regularly or use social media to boost your impact? Do you want to know how to write content that grabs people’s attention (is clicky) and then keeps it (is sticky)? Then this workshop is for you!

Participants will receive training from Dr. Jospeh Romm, author of How to Go Viral & Reach Millions. In 2006, Romm founded Climateprogress.org, which was named one of the “Best Blogs of 2010” by Time magazine.

Romm will explain 5 practical steps to sharply boost your readership and online presence. Please bring a copy of a blog or social media post you are working on and/or an idea for a headline of such a post.

This is the third in a series of Member-Only Workshops at the Open Gov Hub titled Educating and Storytelling for Impact. Non-hub members can request to attend any one of these workshops by emailingyeukai.mukorombindo@globalintegrity.org

This discussion will share the success story of sustainable development through participatory tax governance in one of the provinces in Pakistan. At its core, it's about women's empowerment through educating beauty salon entrepreneurs, which resulted in boosting tax revenues. Though this project, the registered taxpayers increased by 137% and the tax revenues increased by 330% post the awareness workshops.

We'll be asking:

How social media can be helpful in effective good governance? What are the effective ways in which good governance can be injected into government departments?

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While aspects of the Russia investigation are ongoing, it is now well known and agreed upon by the US intelligence community that overseas hackers succeeded in accessing critical data to influence the 2016 US presidential elections. This has raised serious and unprecedented concerns for American national security and democracy.

What are the new cybersecurity threats to the integrity of elections (in the US and around the world), posed by the digital age?

In light of the imminent midterm elections, this panel will bring together a wide range of deep expertise across sectors to investigate this critical question.

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This is an event hosted at Open Gov Hub by some of our members and network.

You are invited to join Chemonics, the International Budget Partnership, and Root Change for a panel event on innovations in strengthening accountability, including insights from the USAID/Nigeria Strengthening Advocacy and Civic Engagement (SACE) project.

Are public actors accountable for delivering inclusive and equitable public services and rights? Is this possible within complex systems of actors, institutions, and other factors? Today, programs such as USAID's Strengthening Advocacy and Civic Engagement (SACE) in Nigeria are increasingly turning to accountability ecosystems to inform democracy and governance interventions. Innovative ideas and practice have evolved the thinking, yet there are still only a handful of program examples on which much of this understanding rests. In other words, while the theory behind the new consensus in development is sound, we still need to test these innovations in the field and learn from the results. Furthermore, these new insights have brought about important shifts in context, as many countries see economic growth alongside continuing corruption and increased restrictions on civic activism and engagement. In these contexts, the question that arises is what are the most effective ways to contribute to positive change public accountability in challenging circumstances?

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Despite many advances the global movement to promote transparent governments and fight corruption has made in recent years, it seems that still too often, the issue of open government remains a niche realm limited to experts and technocrats.

How can open government advocates better explain what opengov is and why it matters to everyday citizens, and link this issue to their daily concerns?

Luther Jeke, head of the iCampus - Liberia's first innovation hub - will be visiting DC and sharing what his community is learning about how to encourage citizen participation and accountability, even in the midst of great challenges to basic education, health and economic development.

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What does it take to uncover an international corruption scandal?

Hear from Ivan Angelovski, an investigative journalist from the Balkans and current Open Gov Hub Community Catalyst, who will tell how he was part of a team that uncovered a $3.2 billion arms trade corruption story, which involved actors in the US, Central Europe and the Middle East.

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Book Talk & Discussion

How can advocates of participatory, inclusive development break through bureaucratic hurdles and implement meaningful reforms at scale that translate into improve quality of life for citizens?

How exactly do politics and governance issues affect the quality of basic service delivery?

And ​what can a politically-sensitive systems approach to governance reform look like in local and sector-level applications? 

Join us for reflections on these integral questions for international development practitioners from Brian Levy, during this lunchtime book talk and discussion.

Lunch provided.

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Viktoria Dimitrova and Eyad Mahadeen have both joined the Partnership for Transparency this fall as fellows. They are both working on designing projects addressing corruption which they will implement upon their return to Bulgaria and Jordan respectively.

Eyad will present on the idea of using an awareness campaign to fight Corruption in Jordan. Viktoria will present on the challenges the Bulgarian higher educational system faces today including fraud and corruption in universities.

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Bring your ideas and brainstorm with us on how to uncover strategic lessons and build solidarity with democracy defenders at home and abroad.

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Bring your lunch and join us for a conversation with Anne Wallestad, President & CEO of BoardSource. Drawing from BoardSource’s signature study, Leading with Intent: A National Index of Nonprofit Board Practices, she will share insights on trends, strengths and challenges that boards and executives are facing. Through an interactive conversation, she will discuss how – as executives – you can make high-value investments in your partnership with your board, and why it matters.

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The global trend of autocratization – the gradual or sudden demise of democratic regime traits – provides new challenges to the work of international actors such as the Open Government Partnership (OGP). Capitalizing the world’s largest dataset on democracy, the research of the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem) can help OGP staff and partners and other advocates of open government to understand the current processes of backsliding and closing space better.

In this seminar, the Deputy Director of the V-Dem Institute, Anna Lührmann, who will be visiting DC from Sweden, will present the V-Dem dataset and lead a discussion.

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A challenge capacity building programs have longed faced is the lack of leading indicators for capacity building. In other words, the field has not been able to directly predict how or, even if, organizational and technical capacity development leads to improved performance or results.

The Cooperative Capacity Framework solves this problem. The framework consists of five, measurable organizational states that correlate to performance. Our experience with the framework tells us that as organizations move up to a higher state, their performance, by any stakeholder indicator, at least doubles. 

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Whistleblower Workshop Series (see other events in the series here).

This training workshop will offer insights to immigration justice activists on how to safely and effectively maximize the potential of two important tools for transparency: whistleblowers and FOIA.

In a political climate hostile to not only immigrant communities and human rights but truth and open government, whistleblowers inside immigration enforcement agencies or their contractors are essential to protecting the most vulnerable and demanding government accountability.

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Whistleblower Workshop Series (see other events in the series here).

Information about government or corporate abuses or dangerous practices can catalyze accountability and reform on issues of critical importance to public interest activists. This training workshop will offer insights to public interest activists on how to work with the rights and vulnerabilities of employee sources while offering tactics to help leverage their information, including using FOIA, while minimizing their risk. 

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When a cause finds you: Practical considerations and tools for the short-term and questions to ask for the long-term when designing a website.

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Corruption researchers tend to focus a lot of attention on why systemically corrupt countries fail to improve and why anticorruption efforts often fall flat. As such, the field has had a difficult time identifying and explaining how positive change happens in order to inspire new and more effective anti-corruption interventions.

Recent research by Heather Marquette and Caryn Peiffer focuses on the opposite: potential success stories in anti-corruption. Using a novel three-step methodology developed to identify previously hidden ‘positive outliers’, they look at sectors within a country that have successfully reduced bribery against the odds in otherwise systemically corrupt countries. Having identified up to 18 potential cases, they drill down in two ‘positive outlier’ cases - Uganda’s health sector and South Africa’s police - to uncover the political processes and policies that have been responsible for bribery reduction in each case. In doing so, they draw out lessons about how positive changes happened and what can be learned for more successful anti-corruption interventions.

However, their success cases also highlight some important tensions that raise red flags for future interventions, and they look at important lessons from these as well.

We look forward to welcoming Heather Marquette to present the findings and to discuss the potential implications for anti-corruption policy and practice together with Francesca Recanatini from the World Bank.

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We at the Natural Resource Governance Institute are excited to announce the June launch of Petronia, the first online simulation game of natural resource governance. The launch will be followed by an interactive discussion with leading academics in the field, game designers, and practitioners from the anticorruption and transparency movement. Join us for as we explore the lessons learned and exciting future directions in gaming for good governance! 

Refreshments and reception to follow the discussion.

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U.S. politics are under increasing strain as multiple investigations of President Trump and his presidential campaign, business associates, and top officials progress. The investigations raise tough questions about foreign involvement in U.S. elections, illicit payments, campaign finance violations, and obstruction of justice.

What can US civil society learn from similar cases around the world? What can democracy defenders do to anticipate the consequences of cases that roil the sense of stability and democracy? How well are our democratic institutions and norms working from a comparative perspective? What should civil society do and anticipate to ensure and protect those norms and institutions in light of lessons learned from around the world?

We invite you to a conversation on June 12 about what happens to a country’s democracy when the head of state is embroiled in investigations into serious crimes and corruption.

Refreshments provided.

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Dan argues that high-quality implementation of foreign aid programs often requires contextual information that cannot be seen by those in distant headquarters. Tight controls and a focus on reaching pre-set measurable targets often prevent front-line workers from using skill, local knowledge, and creativity to solve problems in ways that maximize the impact of foreign aid. Drawing on a novel database of over 14,000 discrete development projects across nine aid agencies and eight paired case studies of development projects, he argues that aid agencies will often benefit from giving field agents the authority to use their own judgments to guide aid delivery. This “navigation by judgment” is particularly valuable when environments are unpredictable and when accomplishing an aid program’s goals is hard to accurately measure.

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Every year RightsCon brings together activists, technologists, policy makers, and business and government representatives to talk about the current state of human rights in the digital age.

Members from the Open Gov Hub community attended this year's RightsCon in Toronto on May 16-18, and we want to share all that we learned (or didn't learn) with you during this brownbag lecture.

Dhanaraj Thakur (Web Foundation), Kristi Arbogast (Open Gov Hub), and Ulrich Mans (Political & Legal Advisor on Human Rights and UN Affairs) will be presenting, so come eager to learn and ask questions about:

• disinformation

• algorithmic accountability

• discussions between the AI ethics, open data, and privacy communities

• data privacy

• human rights defender technology

• the digital divide and gender gap

• artificial intelligence in low and middle income countries

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Join us to learn how practical applications of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can change the way your organization sees, measures and interacts with the world. NGOs and International Organizations to support core business activities including fundraising and business development, advocacy and communications, program management and implementation, and monitoring and evaluation to name a few.

• GIS helps organizations to advance their vision and achieve their mission faster by expanding their understanding, reach and impact.

• GIS has the power to change how we think and how we act, it is transformational! It integrates geographic science into everything we measure, analyze, predict, plan, and execute.

Please join us to find out how to get started or how to advance your existing GIS platform. There will be food, drinks, and breakout sessions to learn more.

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Why do so many governments struggle with delivering the most basic, needed services to their people? And how can development practitioners better support the building of state institutions that can better do so?

The Open Gov Hub is pleased to host a book talk on Building State Capability with co-author Michael Woolcock of the World Bank and Harvard Kennedy School, and a panel discussion with diverse perspectives to address these questions.

This book articulates and addresses underlying problems at the very heart of the work of international development (getting at “what is truly the essence of the development problem,” in the words of Francis Fukuyama’s review of the book). It then presents problem driven iterative adaptation (PDIA) as an effective approach to address this field’s essential (even existential) challenge.

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Open Gov Hub is pleased to announce a free website workshop designed to give attendees hands-on, expert advice to simplify, clarify, and boost website engagement and online conversion rates.

Erick Pfleiderer, Creative and User Experience (UX) Director at Taoti Creative, will be visiting Open Gov Hub, May 10, at 12pm in the Amenities Lounge. He’ll offer best practices for UX and effective research methods to equip you with tools you need to understand your users’ thinking and behavior – and lead them to take the actions you want. You’ll gain insight into what works and what doesn’t work. You’ll learn what steps you can take to make your website a more effective information and communications resource that people visit again and again.

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This is an event hosted by Hub Member Global Integrity during OpenGov Week.

Following the release of preliminary research data for the sixth round of its Africa Integrity Indicators (AII), Global Integrity is pleased to invite you to an online live Q&A session to take place on Wednesday, 9 May 2018 from 12:30-13:30 GMT (08:30-09:30 ET) during OpenGov Week.