Officials Group
MEETING MINUTES
Date / time: Wednesday April 26, 1-2pm
Venue: The Reserve Bank, No.2 The Terrace
Officials Groups participants: Auckland Council, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Parliamentary Counsel Office, State Services Commission, Statistics New Zealand and Treasury.
Agenda & Topics
1. Welcome and acknowledgements
Apologies noted from Ministry of Justice, Te Puni Kōkiri and Department of Internal Affairs.
The Open Government Partnership Independent Reporting Mechanism have indicated they are close to selecting a Reviewer for New Zealand’s National Action Plan 2016-18. They are expecting to announce the Reviewer in June.
Minutes provided for meeting 22 March 2017
2. Update on commitments
Progress updates were provided.
- Commitment 1: Open Budget
- 20 interviews with various stakeholders have taken place or are booked in.
- Stakeholders for these interviews have been identified in eight categories: media, industry representatives, analysts, financial organisations, academia, international organisations, iwi, and community groups.
- Commitment 2: Improving official information practices
- Progress is being made on developing official information guidance and the next collection of OIA statistics from agencies.
- Commitment 3: Improving open data access and principles
- Agency feedback has been sought on the Open Data Charter
- Development of the scope of further public consultations
- Commitment 4: Tracking progress and outcomes of open government data release
- Investigating an online tool for agency use, to assess their open data maturity.
- Commitment 5: Ongoing engagement for OGP
- Developing logistics, engagement and communications approaches to lead up to the midterm self-assessment
- Completed redesign of the ‘what’s happening’ section of New Zealand’s OGP website
- Commitment 6: Improving access to legislation
- Consultation with agencies underway
- Developing a template for drafting legislation, for use by agencies
- Commitment 7: Improving policy practices
- Progress is being made on the delivery of an online policy toolkit
- The toolkit is being designed to provide a number of web-based products for policy practitioners
- Once launched these products will be kept up-to-date through a wiki-style approach to authorship
- A user-centric approach is being applied to entry into the toolkit, so that users can approach the information from a number of angles
3. Approach to mid-term assessment / reporting
The mid-term assessment of the National Action Plan 2016-18 is due to be published on 30 September 2017.
Officials will be responsible for reporting on their commitments
4. Reporting
Members of the Expert Advisory Panel (EAP) provided feedback on the draft reporting template. Two pieces of feedback were received, both positive.
A progress tracker is being drafted to test its usefulness for the EAP as it guides the implementation of the National Action Plan 2016-18.
5. Next steps
Members suggested that we consider changing the schedule of Officials Group meetings. It was proposed to meet every two months and to extend the meetings to 90 minutes.