The Open Government Partnership was officially launched in September 2011 by eight founding governments – Brazil, Indonesia, Norway, South Africa, United Kingdom, Mexico and United States – and nine civil society organisations.

Today, as we prepare for the annual meeting of the OGP in Brasilia, the partnership comprises a group of 54 countries and various civil society organisations, as well as interested private sector and international institutions.

It is a remarkable accomplishment in such a short period of time for an international, multi-stakeholder initiative.

This April, after the OGP has only been operating for six months, we will have gone from eight action plans and 46 participating countries to 50 action plans and 54 participating countries.

As remarkable as these numbers might be, we can only grasp their full meaning when we look at the powerful stories and the political will behind the efforts of each country and civil society organisation to participate and lead the open government movement.

Countries that wish to participate formally in the OGP, as explained on the website, must fulfil seven steps. These include meeting a set of minimum eligibility criteria on fiscal transparency, access to information, public disclosure about public officials and engagement with citizens. They also include developing and publishing a plan for open government, with concrete commitments, and cooperating with local, independent governance experts to generate a reporthow the action plan is being implemented.

But these formal steps in themselvesdo not encompass the true meaning of participation in the OGP. Participation in OGP means engagement and political will; it means sharing responsibilities with civil society to create and implement important public policies and reforms. It means sharing the decision making process from the outset.

As President Dilma Rousseff stated in her remarks at the official launch of OGP last September, open government is not just about allowing individual access to budget execution data. It goes beyond, to ensure the rendering of accounts by governments, monitoring, oversight and citizens' participation. It is about establishing a permanent two-way channel for communication between governments and society.

Being part of the OGP entails leadership and collaboration with all interested stakeholders, both at a national and international level.

And this is what makes the numbers above so remarkable: all countries and institutions that have engaged in OGP have accepted the challenge and objective of creating a new way of achieving our goals in preventing and combating corruption, in improving public services, in strengthening integrity in the public and in the private sector, and in creating safer communities.

The OGP is not simply a new group of countries sharing information about past actions, nor simply a response to difficult economic times. We are building mechanisms to strengthen democracy, new ways to engage with civil society and new partnerships to address old challenges of governance.