Good quality public services are critical to the lives of citizens, and ensuring their provision is an essential function of government. But governments are not alone in this; experience and evidence built up over a number of decades has shown that citizens and civil society also have important roles to play in improving and delivering public services, and achieving social outcomes. Open government reforms have the potential to improve existing services, and unlock the ideas, knowledge and capacity for new solutions to societal challenges.
This paper provides guidance on how to develop robust and ambitious public service commitments, setting out:
• The case for making open public services reforms
• Guidelines on developing open public service commitments
• The qualities of robust open public service commitments
• Model open public service commitments, including recommendations, resources and case studies