The institutions of the OGP Basque Country initiative reaffirm their intention to head the Action Plan commitment groups.

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The OGP Basque Country Multistakeholder Forum yesterday met at the Artium Museum in Vitoria-Gasteiz to continue to work on the Action Plan 2018-2020 co-creation process involving Basque citizens and institutions. 

The meeting was attended by representatives of the eight entities that are the project promoters (Basque Government, Araba, Bizkaia and Gasteiz Provincial Councils and Bilbao, Donostia-San Sebastián and Vitoria-Gasteiz city councils, along with Innobasque) and the citizen representatives resulting from the self-selection process conducted with the support of the Basque Innovation Agency – Innobasque.

The Multistakeholder Forum analysed the first draft of the plan prepared after the citizen contributions from the Open Forum on 2 July. The aim is to have a plan that has been reviewed and contrasted with the citizens in accordance with OGP terms and standards. Therefore, the proposals received throughout the process will be fine-tuned after consulting with the citizenry.

Strong institutional leadership, which was ratified at the Multistakeholder Forum, is needed to implement the commitments co-created with the citizenry and validated in the Open Forum. The intention of heading or co-heading the commitment task forces that are going to be created from an institutional, citizen and expert perspective has to be determined for each commitment. The institutions likewise have to contribute the financial and personal means required to do so, without losing sight the monitoring and unifying role of the Multistakeholder Forum in that regard. 

Furthermore, citizen organisations will show their intention to actively sign up to certain commitment to provide the grassroots and sectoral perspective of their respective associations, along with acting as a transmitting link of the work supervised by the Multistakeholder Forum.