Confidence in government has great impact on the effectiveness of socioecomic activities as well as the government policy effectiveness. This paper presents 6 areas of governance, according to OECD, a government needs to consider in order to preserve the public trust in their government. The Korean open government policy result assessed by the Open Government Partnership(OGP) is used to analyze the output and the causes behind those outputs. The analysis found that the Korean government has focused on producing outputs that would be resulted in good public relations materials, instead of planing for strategies and concordances in line with promoting the public confidence in government.
The possible explanations for such results are as follow. First, since the plan was not developed with the OGP action plan guidelines, so the commitments could not assure neither the openness nor transparency during the development process. Second, the control tower for the action, the Ministry of Interior, was not in position to control other governmental departments and agencies, since they are pretty much equal in the line of command of the Korean government. Third, maybe the most compelling problem, the government officials seemed not fully understood the core values of the open government proposed by the OGP. It was couped with a performance incentive system in line with producing visible outputs that caused the lack of openness, transparency, and citizen participation which are all time consuming to the officials.
Based on the analysis, the paper proposes the following suggestions to promote the public trust in Korean government. First, the control tower sould be designated with kinf of influence that can oversight all departments and agencies. Also, an adequate manpower should be commissioned in order to carry out the task in hands properly. Second, the open government action plan should be designed in detail in order to reflect the values guidelined by OGP. In addition, an adequate timeline should be given in ordr to carry out the action plans throughly and effectively. Third, all strategies, plans, processes, outputs, feedbacks, and evaluations should be documented and recorded to enhance the openness and transparency of procedures and processes. Fourth, continuous training for the officials are needed to emphasize the importance of openness, transparency, and citizen participation to ensure the pulic trust in government. Lastly, a periodical assessments of the government trust should be carried out and publicly announced to ensure the proper self-assessment and awareness as well as openness to the public.