Open Government

Earlier this year, Ukraine launched a new procurement system. This pilot project was initiated through a public-private partnership of government, NGOs, civil society and businesses. After a new law is phased in next year, all government procurement will take place in electronic format.

Ordnance Survey (OS), the British national mapping agency, has switched to version 3 of the Open Government Licence as the default for all of its open data products. This should make it easier for the open data community and other data publishers to re-use the OS mapping data, and for the data to be freely and easily mixed with other UK government sources.

After one year, the UK Open Government Forum now has over 600 members. The platform was established by Involve in November 2014 on behalf of the UK Open Government Network (OGN). It aims to help coordinate work on the Open Government Partnership (OGP), and build and support the open government movement in the UK.

Last month, the UK hosted the first summit of the Digital 5 group. This alliance of countries is organised in the same way as the G8 and aims to strengthen the digital economy. The common denominator uniting the D5 members is the principle of openness; they are focused on changing their governments' attitude to technology by adopting open standards and open source software as well as making digital government more effective. To achieve this, they intend to bring digital skills in-house and encourage short-term contracts with small and medium business suppliers.