To tell the story of September 21 (2011), it is necessary to go back to a year earlier, to September 23, 2010. That day at the United Nations General Assembly, American President Barack Obama makes one of his inspired and optimistic speeches. He says: “In every corner of the world, we see how innovation promises to make governments more open and accountable to citizens. Now we have to move on. And when we meet again next year, we will have to make specific commitments to promote transparency, fight corruption, energize civic participation, and use new technologies to strengthen the foundations of freedom in our countries. ” Very inspired, very optimistic. But his appeal, of course, did not fall on deaf ears, quite the contrary. A group of governments and civil society organizations decided to launch a multilateral initiative to achieve the objectives indicated by Obama: the Open Government Partnership, in short OGP, which would engage participating countries in specific projects (action plans).
OGP was officially born on September 20, 2011, initially led by the United States and Brazil (President Dilma Rousseff was at the launch event with Obama) and 46 participating countries, including Italy. That day Obama called open government “the essence of democracy”: “Here in the United States we have worked to make the government more open and ready to answer citizens’ questions. We are promoting an openness of information on government acts, empowering citizens with new tools to participate in democratic life. And we are publishing more data in open and usable formats on health and safety and the environment because information is power, and so we help people to make more informed decisions, and entrepreneurs to transform data into new products, creating new jobs ”. And we’re also inviting people to contribute their best ideas to government action. And we fight for the freedom of access to the Internet in the world ”.
Ten years have passed and OGP has recorded many action plans, including us, several important results (also in Italy, the FOIA; and various local initiatives for civic participation). But as always in history, innovations do not proceed linearly, there are advanced and withdrawn. At this moment for many of the principles of open government it seems like a moment of retreat: I am thinking of the open data we have not had on the pandemic, the abandonment of the government platform for civic participation and totally wrong sites such as Italia Domani, the one for monitoring the Recovery Plan. Yet there are signals in contrast, such as the SPID used to sign the referendums.
Beyond the determinist optimism of the launch day ten years ago, the principles of open government all remain valid and the reasons of those who continue to fight so that, through the network and social networks, we can have an open democracy, remain valid. informed, participatory and transparent.
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