city-of-guelph-logoEarlier today, the City of Guelph issued a media release announcing the municipality’s innovative open government action plan – the first of its kind in Canada – and we’re thrilled to be a part of it.

Delvinia was recently awarded the contract to assist with the development of Guelph’s open government action plan through a competitive RFP process.

As part of our winning proposal, we have partnered with David Wolfe, Executive Director of the University of Toronto’s Innovation Policy Lab (IPL) at the Munk School of Global Affairs, to work with the City and community stakeholders to deliver a five-year road map and action plan for the City’s open government initiatives.

Nicole Goodman, who we helped to establish as a research fellow at the IPL to work with us on eDemocracy initiatives, will be an integral part of the Delvinia/IPL team.

“Open government is more than simply making government services available online—it is about evolving as a municipality to take on a citizen-centric approach to provide unprecedented access to government in order to create a much more engaged community,” Delvinia CEO Adam Froman said in today’s media release.

The stakeholder and citizen engagement strategy, designed to involve the community in the process, will be key to the development of the road map. The City of Guelph will be using Delvinia’s Voice of eDemocracy platform to engage and involve key stakeholders in providing their input. Built on our AskingCanadians online research community, the platform will enable the municipality to engage in dialogue with citizens and community stakeholders on policy issues that affect the community.

The City’s Open Government Framework, approved by Council last November, builds on Guelph’s history of public participation to co-produce ideas, solutions and services, and defines its unique approach to open government. The framework recognizes open government principles offer an opportunity to address key challenges facing public services, and identifies the need to align current City initiatives that already lend themselves to open government with new initiatives in the form of implementable actions.

A total of $100,000 was approved for this project from the 2013 Corporate Strategic Initiatives Reserve budget.

Delvinia has made a financial investment, matched by the financial support of Mitacs, a national not-for-profit research organization, to fund an academic researcher who will work through the Innovation Policy Lab to study the impact of citizen engagement in the development of the City’s open government road map.

See the full release, here.