Introduction
An important requirement for business associations is to monitor government to see what they are doing and what they are planning to do. Some organisations seek to monitor government on a systematic basis. One organisation doing this is Odekro in Ghana. In Kenya, there are a number of initiatives to track the Governmental process:- The National Council for Law Reporting keeps track of proposals
- The Kenya Parliament has a great site which is regularly updated with the recent happenings.
- The Kenya Private Sector Association (KEPSA) has created a tool to track the government’s performance and have included a Business Bills tracker
- CIC tracks all Bills especially the constitutional ones that must be reviewed by it as per the constitution and they invite the public to comment.
Tracking municipal and local performance
Often the US is the place to look to find laboratories testing new ideas. Erik Pages tracks some of the more interesting examples of regional data and dashboards. The ideal is an open authority, willing to share appropriate data, and to visualise it so that people can quickly get a sense of the performance. Here are some of the sites that Erik recommends as examples of good practice:- The Office of Management and Budget manages many of these including dashboards on regulation, open government, and information technology. State and local governments are in on the act too. Examples include Maryland's StateStat site or Kansas City's KCStat which I particularly like - it is clear and simple.
- The Upjohn Institute has a brief review of regional economic dashboards - and if you are looking for examples, just search for "economic development dashboard".
- For a sample of projects from across the US, Erik recommends visiting the Community Indicators Consortium, where you can find an invaluable library of resources and data along with a large inventory of indicator projects from around the world. More communities are moving to the next level and integrating community indicator projects and performance measurement.
- A further trend is the emergence of specialized dashboards and data projects. These efforts typically target a specific set of issues or focus areas, such as locally-owned businesses and the impact of anchor institutions.