Guidance

Open Government Playbook

The document provides guidance and advice to help policy officials follow open government principles when carrying out their work.

Documents

Details

Open Government Playbook main image

How to use the Open Government Playbook

The sections ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ will help you incorporate the values of open government at each stage of your project. You can use the Playbook as a resource for project planning, as a ‘cheat sheet’ with a list of actions you should deploy in your process, or as a checklist or a ‘to-do’ list when implementing and evaluating the project.

The posters can be printed out and put on your wall or desk as an easily accessible piece of guidance. The cards can be used during your team meetings or workshops to facilitate conversations about implementation of the open government methods.

In addition to the stages of the project, the policy section of the Playbook is split into three open government principles: transparency, participation, accountability. This provides a more detailed account on how to action each principle in your work. The digital and communications cards provide a set of actions that integrate the principles of open government (participation, transparency, accountability).

Methodology

The Playbook has been developed as a response to the growing demand from policymakers, communications, and digital professionals to integrate the principles of open government in their roles. The content of the Playbook was drafted using existing resources (see the ‘further reading’ section), and was consulted with open government experts from Involve and Open Government Partnership. Following the development of the initial policy-only part of the Playbook, the Open Government team at DCMS collaborated with teams at the Government Communications Service and the Government Digital Service to develop the communications and digital parts of the Playbook. The final tool was designed by Philpott Design.

If you have any questions or would like to find out more about the Playbook and how to use it, please email: opengov@dcms.gov.uk

Further reading

Observatory of Public Sector Innovation toolkits.

Open Government Partnership participation and cocreation toolkit

Open Government Partnership Informed Participation Guide

Involve – How to plan a participatory process

Spectrum of participation

Open Government Guide – all topics

Published 13 July 2020