Purpose/Objective of Mission: Support to Ukraine’s ongoing Open Government Partnership (OGP) participation, meet local partners and explore ways to finance OGP commitments Liaise with ongoing Local Governance project staff which has a key e-governance component Provide advise on ongoing project to crowd source the theme of the next NHDR Explore ways in which CO can…

Background I have personally been engaged in the post-015 agenda since September of 2011. I helped BDP Dir draft the project document that was finally approved in December. I specially contributed to the section on the virtual platform which envisaged using mobile technologies such as SMS to increase the level of participation in setting up…

A couple of months ago, Bratislava created an “innovation” fund that is supposed to allocate small grants to COs in the region on a competitive basis. The first tranche of the fund has been launched and several COs have already received funding. Ukraine is one of the COs selected. While on mission in Kyiv, I…

Monday The bad weather in NYC ruined my travel plans to San Jose.  I left home around 11am but the flight only took off at 5:45pm. I missed the connecting flight in Miami which departed at 8pm. Had to spent the night in of of the many hotels that surround Miami’s airport. Tuesday Finally arrived…

Now that Rio+20 is over, I expect the work on post0-2015 will accelerate in the coming  weeks, specially after senior managers return to NY after their holidays. While Rio in the did come up with some sort of agreement (very long indeed, see http://www.uncsd2012.org/thefuturewewant.html), we managed to meet with the Germans who are contributing 1…

Demand for e-governance related services continues to grow. In the last week or so, we saw requests from Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, BIH, Costa Rica and Ukraine. While the first three can be seen in the light of traditional e-governance support (development of national strategies and implementation of priorities) the last two are relate to e-health and…

The governance issues for the post2015 activities continues to evolve. On the technical side, we have agreed to bring all the different aspects under one umbrella. This includes the platform itself, the so-called crowdsourcing (now rename to open analytics) and the planned mobile app for enticing voting and participation. An improved version of TWs will…

This is another paper which OGC has commissioned. The first draft has been shared and did generate  negative reaction (unwarranted in my opinion)  from some DGP quarters. The first draft of the paper is here: DG-SHD-Final-Report-IDCR-14-May-2012 ) Here are my initial set of comments. 1. I have issues with the way the paper sees democracy,…

Here are the updates on this on out work with the BCPR’s Conflict Prevention unit: 1. Supporting IPI study on crowdsourcing and conflict prevention funded by BCPR. The study will compile several case studies and shed some light on the usefulness (or not) of mobiles 2. Planning to have a joint e-gov/Conflict CoP before the…

OCG is working on a few papers for both Rio+20 and post-2015. One of them is this one (ODI-Outline-Democratic-Governance-and-MDGs-23-May-2012 which has been commissioned to ODI. Here are my comments. 1. Methodology: I am unsure whether I understood the proposed methodology. The opening paragraph argues for evidence-based contributions, but it is not clear to me where…

Interesting meeting with a rep from Ushahidi who is based not in Nairobi but in cosy San Francisco. Meeting lasted an hour more or less but I think we managed to bore the guy as he was yawning quite a bit while we spoke about exciting UNDP stuff. Or maybe it was too early for…

The new RC/RR in Swaziland has strong interest in supporting e-gov work in the country and the government seems to be very receptive to the idea. I have received this communication from the RR (RZ Swailand Egov letter) which has specific proposals for our support. RBA HQ is also getting involved but has interest in…

Overall UN processes UN announced appointment of three countries to the High Level Panel on the post-2015 development agenda. The countries include: Indonesia, Liberia and the UK Global Governance Meeting OHCHR submitted the first draft on the global thematic meeting on Friday pm. We are expected to get back to the them sometime this week…

Seems that crowdsourcing has become a “third” pillar of the UN-led multi-stakeholder process, with Global Pulse apparently playing a pivotal role. A draft proposal has been prepared (it is here: http://undpegov.org/~raul/egov/post2015/CrowdsourcedPost-MDGideageneration-4.doc. Here are the initial comments that I shared with GP and UNMC, which were addressed to the communications officer of GP. 1. I think…

Overall UN processes BDP shared latest version of the UN Task Team draft report that will be submitted to the SG. DGG provided comments to the text and submitted them on Monday (draft report and comments have been uploaded to this space) Global Governance Meeting OHCHR sent message indicating that they are running 10 days…