What is Open Government and how to achieve one?

The new government is open, but the idea of an open, inclusive and participatory government in a reciprocal relationship with the population is not recent. However, advances in the technological field have boosted this concept in recent years, allowing States to be two-way with individuals, encouraging participation, improving transparency, accountability and service delivery. 

The concept of Open Government calls for opening the windows of public administration, with the objective of promoting and guaranteeing access to information in order to strengthen transparency, citizen participation in management and control over public affairs. All this, with the help of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). 

In this regard, the States have made progress in this area, as evidenced by the creation of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a multilateral and voluntary initiative, in which the participants commit to the citizenry to "promote transparency, strengthen participation and take advantage of ICTs to improve governance". Currently, the OGP is made up of 78 countries, including Colombia. 

In order to meet the objectives set, governments have been digitally transformed and have incorporated technologies that cooperate to achieve the goals set. 

Technologies for transparency

In order to increase the availability of information on government activities, there are technologies that contribute to the selection of data, the extraction, cataloging and indexing of information, the storage of content, the implementation of search patterns and the generation of knowledge based on the information. It is important to mention that, when searching for open data, technologies have been developed to ensure content protection and user security.  

Thanks to OCR(Optical Character Recognition) and ICR(Intelligent Character Recognition) technologies, not only can the writing on scanned documents be recognized, but also transformed into a computer-compatible language for subsequent cataloging and storage. 

In terms of storage, Big Data is a tool that makes it possible to gather large amounts of data and a variety of information in different formats. Once stored, the contents will be useful to the extent that they generate knowledge. For this reason, the use of technologies such as Linked Data and Data Mining are essential. The former allows establishing relationships between data and the latter is necessary to convert information into knowledge. 

In this regard, Nuvu created two alternatives related to data and the production of knowledge. On the one hand, Houndoc , which enables expert searches in natural language and the navigation of documents that make up the historical memory of the entities. On the other hand, Sophie enables the exploration of institutional data to describe, predict and prescribe behavioral patterns that support decision making. 

Technologies for participation and collaboration

To support the participation of all people in decision making and policy formulation, governments have implemented technologies that generate the active listening of the population and their collaboration, for example, through events for public knowledge by means of tools such as Web Streaming . Likewise, has set up initiatives such as electronic voting and ticketing that facilitate the provision of public services. 

In terms of citizen security, there are secure identification tools such as facial biometrics, used, above all, in key areas such as electronic voting and online procedures. In response to this, Nuvu created an application called paperless, which enables the management of online services based on the validation of users with facial biometrics and language processing, thus ensuring security in the process. 

Thus, different technological solutions have been provided for the States to have an Open Government, more participatory and transparent.