OECD Open Government Dashboard

Open government is a culture of governance that seeks to fundamentally change the way in which governments and citizens interact. Along with the progressive consolidation of countries’ open government agendas, there has been an increasingly loud call for performance indicators that can measure the impact of open government initiatives on broader policy goals (e.g. levels of trust in government).

The OECD is taking this call seriously: Based on the OECD Recommendation of the Council on Open Government (2017), the Dashboard is the first in a series of tools that will ultimately enable the open government community to be able to measure outcomes and impacts. Some sections of the Dashboard were created in close collaboration with the Open Government Partnership.

What is the Dashboard?
The Dashboard is a website that comprises indicators on different open government topics. The present beta-version includes 55 indicators (more to be added over time) that are divided into five sections:

• 1. The concept of open government introduces the concepts of open government and open state.
• 2. The Open Government Partnership (OGP) process and its governance provides indicators relating to different aspects of the OGP process (in those Members and non-Members that participate in the OGP), including for example on the composition, functioning and responsibilities of the multi-stakeholder forum.
• 3. Citizen and stakeholder participation presents data on responding countries’ legal and institutional frameworks for participation, as well as on Participation Portals.
• 4. Transparency and access to information presents data on responding countries’ legal and institutional frameworks to foster transparency and implement their access to information laws.
• 5. Protecting and promoting civic space provides selected data on the protection of fundamental civic freedoms and rights (e.g. freedom of expression, association and assembly), institutional mechanisms protecting these rights, and the enabling environment for civil society intended as enablers of open government.

The Dashboard focuses on the governance arrangements and mechanisms for open government policies. It provides answers to questions such as: What policies guide countries’ open government agendas? Which measures are countries taking to combat on-line hate speech and harassment? Which institutions oversee the implementation of access to information laws? What kind of online portals to facilitate citizen participation do OECD member and partner countries have in place?

The data presented here was gathered through the 2020 OECD Survey on Open Government which aims to monitor the implementation of the 2017 OECD Recommendation of the Council on Open Government.

What are the key features of the Dashboard?
For the first time, the Dashboard gives the open government and public governance community the possibility to track progress, compare practices and establish benchmarks on a diverse range of open government topics.

The Dashboard allows users to interact with the data collected by the OECD. They can easily:

• Apply filters (e.g. OECD Members vs non-Members; OGP Members vs non-Members);
• Create their own aggregations; and
• Export the source data, allowing and reuse them for other purposes.

A users’ manual is available in the “useful links” section below and an explanatory video will be uploaded shortly.

What are the next steps?
The Open Government Dashboard is designed as a living tool that will be constantly updated, upgraded and expanded. Over the course of 2022, the OECD Secretariat will expand the present beta-version in the following ways:

• Integrate users’ feedback (see feedback form in the “useful links” section);
• Add more indicators and data from different areas of open government, based on the results of the 2020 OECD Survey on Open Government;
• Add data from additional member and non-member countries;
• Implement “country fiches” to provide an overview of the main features in the area of open government of each responding country (the present beta-version only includes aggregated data);
• Add grouped data on certain themes to allow users to build their own composites, based on their preferences;
• Integrate the Dashboard with the existing Toolkit and Case Navigator for Open Government-

Useful links and information

• OECD work on assessing the impact of open government reforms
• How to Guide
• Provide feedback
• OECD work in Open Government

The data presented in the Dashboard were collected through the 2020 OECD Survey on Open Government, which was administered between November 2020 and March 2021. All data presented here refers to the status quo in responding countries as of 30 October 2020. The first version of the Dashboard includes data from 44 countries, including 34 OECD Members:

• The following OECD Members are included in the beta-version: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States of America.
• The following non-Members are included in the beta-version: Argentina, Brazil, Morocco, Romania, Tunisia, Indonesia, Lebanon, Kazakhstan, Peru, and Ukraine, of which Argentina, Brazil, Morocco, Romania, and Tunisia are Adherents to the OECD Recommendation of the Council on Open Government.
• Respondents were the delegates to the OECD Working Party on Open Government or corresponding country contact points, who co-ordinated the response across their respective governments. All data displayed in this beta-version has been validated by countries. All changes to the dashboard, including its data, are documented and will be uploaded in a metadata document. The data underlying the graphs presented in the Dashboard as well as more extensive documentation will be available in January 2022 in the Qualitative Dissemination Database of the OECD. The corresponding link will be published at the time of release on this website.

In addition to the survey data, the Dashboard includes the following two external sources:

• The categorisation of countries into federal / unitary state structure is based on: World Observatory on Subnational Government Finance and Investment (SNG-WOFI), SNG-WOFI Database, (accessed 12 November, 2021).
• The categorisation of countries in regards to their human development is based on: United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Index (HDI),  (accessed 12 November, 2021). Specifically, the category “Top third of HDI distribution” refers to a country HDI value that is equal to or higher than the value at the 67th percentile of respondents currently included in the dashboard. “Middle third of HDI distribution” corresponds to a country HDI value that falls in between the values of the 33rd percentile and the 67th percentile. “Bottom third of HDI distribution” indicates a country HDI value below the value of the 33rd percentile.