Open Government: This is not how you do openness

On Friday evening, during dump hour, the State Services Commission "announced" its formal engagement process for its (late) Open Government partnership Second National Action Plan. I say "announced", because in their usual fashion, there was no actual publicity, just a hard to notice link on a buried corner of its website which only sad tragics like me read. The good news: there'll lbe an engagement process (as mentioned last week) with workshops etc. It even has a timeline, according to which we are already in "stage 2", raising awareness. How are we supposed to "raise awareness"? One of their suggestions is to "follow @OGPNZ on Twitter". What happens if you try and do that? Uh-oh...


This is how the government does "openness": with a protected Twitter account which will only provide information to its friends. The message is clear: they're not really interested in engagement at all. And if that isn't the message they wanted to send, well, too late - they've fucked it up. Again.

Heckuva job they're doing there. Great use of public money.

Meanwhile, if you're still interested in open government despite SSC repeatedly slamming the door in our faces, they also suggest emailing ogp@engage2.co.nz to "stay up to date". I gues I'll do that and see what happens.