Copyright (c) 2026 Diego Ospina Serna
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This essay examines the foundations of open government through a historical-conceptual analysis that establishes the epistemological continuity between the principle of publicity and its implications for contemporary paradigms of government transparency. It demonstrates that open government policies are sustained, on the one hand, as an institutional consolidation of Enlightenment ideals that established publicity as a transcendental criterion for political legitimacy. On the other hand, it examines the connections of the approach to the principle of transparency and access to information as elements of a new political paradigm regarding the democratic legitimacy of the public law normative system. This essay reviews the similarities and conceptual convergences between the structure of information dissemination in open-source software systems and the open government scheme, identifying common grounds around a discursive philosophy oriented towards openness, while understanding technology as an accessory tool for the achievement of the goals proposed by this paradigm. Finally, the transformative impact of the open government transparency principle on the dogmatics of public law is analyzed as a change in the classical conception of the idea of government, concluding by pointing out its importance in traditional administrative procedures, incorporating aspects such as citizen participation, proactive transparency, and the co-creation of public value as constitutive and affirming elements of contemporary state legitimacy.
