OPEN

An experiment with data from the open government partnership: Ranking countries

August 19, 2014 / maestro / ogov, open data, open government, Uncategorized

The OGP is a global organization to promote Open government on more than 60 countries.

Every member can submit a annual plan to explain which will be their action for the next year. This plan is independently reviewed and their reviews are published.

Even more, some main data about accomplishment are made public in this databases (Commitments analyzed and Accomplishments of the plan).

Let’s make a tiny experiment with these data.

First of all we have to know that the submitted plan could incorporate new actions or existing ones. Secondly these actions could be completed or not accordingly to the plan. Thirdly and very important, these action could have a moderate, minor or a transformative effect on the countries’ governance. Last but not least, these action could be relevant (or no) for an open government plan.

In all these dimensions of analysis there are some cases in which it is not clear the qualification (or data are not available). These cases should be also considered in this experiment with data.Also severla countries did not submit their reviews on time so their data are not available (USA, UK, S. Africa, Philippines, Mexico, Indonesia and Brazil)

Now let’s create a draft metric about the performance of the different countries.

my first attempt is

[math]
Plan Ambition = log (\sum 100*(Action_i(new))* 100*Action_i(impact)* 100*Action_i(specificity))
[/math]
Why the log? In order to promote more detailed action plans (more actions) but without penalize those more concise. Multiplied if the action has real impact and if the action really affects governance. With these metric we could rank countries according to these graph.

Similarly the progress will be just a minor correction on above formula, and normalized by the # of actions.
[math]
Plan Ambition = log ((\sum 100*(Action_i(new))* 100*Action_i(impact)* 100*Action_i(specificity)*Action_i(progress))/\sum _i)
[/math]

And the the ranking would look like this.

Of course it is just a mere experiment. Possibly unfair with some countries because of the structure of their plan, the assigned weights or because of past experience makes them harder to be ambitious in their plan formulation.
Are we mature enoguh to create such official ranking? I strongly believe it.

Find here the raw data calculation if you want to make your own experiment.

Annex.

Find here the table which assign weights for every dimension of the actions in the plan fo every country.

Tags: IRN, OGP