Darllenwch y dudalen hon yn Gymraeg

Just over 2 years ago we published out first ever set of Open Government commitments and with work already underway on the next set we thought we should let you know what we’ve managed to achieve.

Taking a step back though, it’s probably worth explaining what we mean by Open Government commitments and why we need them. Well put simply open government is about us being transparent in the way we work and the decisions we make. It’s about engaging and working with those who are affected by our decisions and making information free and easy to access so the people of Wales can hold us to account.

As we mentioned in our previous blog post, along with the rest of the UK we’ve signed up to the Open Government Partnership (OGP) which is a global initiative focused on promoting the open government agenda. In doing so the UK is required to develop a national action plan every 2 years outlining our Open Government commitments. Doing this provides us with an opportunity to publicly state how we’re going to attempt to be more open. As part of the process there is also a requirement for us to regularly report on our progress in addition to independent assessments on how we’re doing. So there’s no hiding!

The good news is that by the time we were mid-way through the process we’d already made good progress across a number of our 9 commitments. Even better the mid-term independent assessment identified that of all the UK commitments only 2 were classed as ‘Star’[1] commitments and both of these belong to us.

What we’ve achieved so far…

We’re proud that in 2 years, all but one of our commitments have been completed. However, this is only the start of the journey and we need to continue to build on what we’ve done so far. We particularly recognise the importance of working more closely with civil society in Wales. This is something we’ve been trying to do by working with the Open Government Network Wales in developing the next set of commitments, which are due to be published later this year.

If you want to find out more about how we met our commitments, you can take a look at the Welsh Government end of term self-assessment report.

[1] Star commitments are those identified as being specific, relevant, potentially transformative, and substantially or fully implemented