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This post originally appears on the Open Government Partnership<\/a> website, as part of\u00a0a series on public service delivery for open government.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n A friend of mine hates development buzzwords. Ever since Andrea Cornwall and her colleagues published \u201cDeconstructing Development Discourse: Buzzwords and Fuzzwords<\/a>\u201d in 2010, said friend has always been conscious about her work language not containing \u201cterms that combine general agreement on the abstract notion that they represent with endless disagreement about what they might mean in practice\u201d \u2013 such as empowerment, collaboration, rights-based, and poverty reduction. The most recent word she started hating was co-creation.<\/p>\n Co-creation, a term long used in the private sector, has been increasingly appropriated in the public sector in recent years. It supposedly means that \u201cgovernment and citizens initiate, design, or implement programs, projects, or activities together<\/a>\u201d. While the term is akin to the concept of citizen participation, its main difference, one author argues, is that \u201cit does not stop at actionable knowledge<\/a>\u201d but proceeds in ensuring that \u201cpractical outcomes\u201d are reached. It presumes that both government and citizens have relatively the same power and capacity to define an agenda, implement and monitor it, and achieve its intended results.<\/p>\n Open Government Partnership<\/a>\u00a0(OGP)\u2019s very model is premised on the value of such co-creation. In member countries,\u00a0national action plans<\/a>\u00a0are meant to be co-created; government and civil society sit together at the same table, define commitments and particularize measurable results.<\/p>\n The recently held OGP event on\u00a0Open Government for Public Service Delivery in Asia<\/a>\u00a0jointly hosted by the Asian Development Bank, the United National Development Program, and the OGP Support Unit gathered \u00a0close to 80 participants from government and civil society in 9 countries from the region with the intent to \u201ccatalyze ambitious public service delivery reforms, foster learning between government agencies, civil society organizations and development partners working on improving public services, and exploring how the OGP platform can be used to \u201cco-create, evaluate and showcase impactful reforms\u201d.<\/p>\n A range of initiatives were discussed. Among these were Indonesia\u2019s\u00a0LAPOR!<\/a>, a public complaint mechanism to make public service delivery responsive, Philippine\u2019s\u00a0Governance Hubs<\/a>\u00a0that promote collaboration between government and civil society in monitoring government programs, Mongolia\u2019s\u00a0MASAM project<\/a>\u00a0on social accountability, and Pakistan\u2019s\u00a0Citizen Satisfaction Index<\/a>\u00a0(CSI). From these discussions, it was quite apparent that the manner by which co-creation happened is differentiated, and the role of civil society in the co-creation process has not been the same in each case. LAPOR!, for example, is a government-led initiative with civil society participation while Pakistan\u2019s CSI was a product of a collaborative process between the government and the United Nations Development Program.<\/p>\n It was interesting to reflect on the experiences of the other participants at the forum and how it relates to the types of initiatives that we at the\u00a0Jakarta Lab<\/a>\u00a0have implemented or are currently implementing. \u00a0My three key take-aways are as follows:<\/p>\n In our work at the\u00a0city government of Banda Aceh<\/a>\u00a0in Indonesia, several of our initiatives in open data succeeded because of the willingness of the city government to sit together with different organisations and citizens, including an anti-corruption group, to define priorities in proactive disclosure of data.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n\n