Open and transparent conversations with Dialogue
The challenge
The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is an international agreement by governments to create greater transparency, increase citizen participation and use new technologies to make their governments more open, effective, and accountable.
New Zealand has been a member of the OGP since 2013. Since they joined, Open Government Partnership New Zealand have published a series of National Action Plans, revisited every two years. In keeping with the goal of encouraging and increasing citizen participation, OGP New Zealand make these action plans available for public comment.
The approach
It's important that the public comment process reflects OGP principles. So for their online engagement option, they wanted a platform that would support open discussion rather than something like a consultation, which tends to be a more closed process.
Dialogue, a discursive online tool made with the intention of fostering constructive conversations, was an ideal option. Participants post ideas under a set 'challenge', or discussion topic. Ideas are displayed publicly, and other users can read, rate and comment on others' submissions.
The results
The New Zealand OGP have run nine different challenges on their Dialogue site, relating to three different National Action Plans. One of these challenges received nearly 500 submissions. Once they'd all been analysed and categorised, the team updated the challenge description with a range of different topic links so that visitors could choose which ideas they wanted to read.
They've also customised their Dialogue homepage, linking to different OGP resources, showing information about supporting events, and displaying a timeline for the current Action Plan engagement process.
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Delib is a govtech leader specialising in consultation and engagement, trusted by over 600 government organisations worldwide, including major planning projects. Since 2004, we've been building secure, accessible digital platforms to make participation simpler, fairer, and more inclusive. Our flagship product, Citizen Space, was built in collaboration with the UK government and has supported more than 11 million responses across over 110,000 democratic activities.