During GovCamp Scotland on Monday 7 November, the Scottish government signed a Charter for Digital Participation. Organisations from public, private, and academic sectors also signed the charter.

"The focus of this Charter is on improving digital participation. However all signatories recognise the need for collaborative action across the digital agenda, and the importance of aligning all appropriate resources."

"By signing this Charter, the founding participants are communicating clearly to all sectors of Scottish society that there is a collective commitment and responsibility to increase the levels of digital participation amongst our citizens and to realise the economic, social and environmental benefits this can bring.

This Charter is designed to enable mutual working relationships among parties based on shared outcomes and agreed ways of working together. This Charter will strengthen relationships across the public, private, third sector and academia and foster trust and reciprocity. It will enable open data and knowledge transfer and open innovation to flow, thus enabling progress towards Scotland’s digital future."

Opening up government held data for re-use is an integral part of increasing digital participation:

"The Scottish Government undertakes to provide open access to data required to enable the Digital Participation Action Group and Digital Participation Programme Board to meet their responsibilities, and to provide appropriate access to Ministers and civil servants. It will also continue to work with CoSLA and other partner bodies on agreeing principles for the opening up of public data wherever that is possible, including the creation of an information architecture and governance that supports the reuse of open data."

By April 2012 a supplement to the charter should be published with more details as well as action plans to make good on the commitments in the charter. This includes a Scottish open government data plan:

"A plan to obtain and publish open data sets in order to encourage re-use of public sector information and to enable the development of new applications."

Open government data is positioned here as a resource and object of sociality that is a key ingredient in making the bigger goals of digital inclusion, participation and economic stimulation possible.