As always, please feel free to send updates through the OpeningParliament.org contact page for inclusion in the News Brief.
News from the OpeningParliament.org community:
Globally, the OGP’s Legislative Openness Working Group organized GLOW, or Global Legislative Openness Week. GLOW consisted of events and activities focused on transparent, participatory legislative processes organized by members of the parliamentary openness community in 30 countries. Further details about event outcomes can be found on the blog.
The voting period for Making All Voices Count’s Global Innovation Competition began October 22 and concludes November 23. The competition includes 241 ideas, many of which were submitted by members of the OP community. The public is encouraged to review these ideas and vote for those they believe will most effectively empower citizens and secure more accountable, open governance in the program’s 12 key countries.
In Latin America, the LALT Network released their 2014 Index of Legislative Transparency, with detailed analysis on the congresses of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, México, Perú, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
In Mexico, the Open Parliament Alliance launched as a collaboration between Congress, the Federal Institute for Access to Information and Data Protection (IFAI), and a coalition of civil society groups with the purpose of ensuring that Mexico’s 32 state legislatures and national congress comply with principles of parliamentary openness.
Mexico also hosted AbreLatam and Con Datos, two important events organized around open government, legislative transparency, and citizen participation. A short Spanish language summary of the conversations that took place at these events can be found here.
In Portugal, the parliament passed a resolution supporting the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness with near identical language to the Declaration itself. The resolution progressed through the entire legislative process, from committee to plenary, before ultimately being passed on July 10.
In Venezuela, Transparencia Venezuela organized a week of transparency events focused on legislative transparency, freedom of information, and countering corruption. During the week, TV launched a proposed bill to increase the accountability of regional legislative councils.
In Liberia, NAYMOTE, the Institute for Research and Democratic Development (IREDD), and others presented a petition signed by over 10,000 Liberians to the 53rd Legislature to allow citizens to witness normal legislative proceedings. NAYMOTE is also holding community meetings and engaging MPs to promote greater awareness of Ebola through their call center.
In Canada, OpenHouseNS launched in September. The new parliamentary monitoring system was developed by OpenNorth for the Nova Scotia House of Assembly. The platform uses SayIt, a Poplus component developed by mySociety, in order to make legislators’ transcripts easier to browse.
In the United States, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the Sunlight Foundation, and the OpenGov Foundation recently produced a series of recommendations for improving transparency and accountability in the House of Representatives.
Elsewhere, the Participatory Politics Foundation (PPF) was among 18 organizations recently awarded funding from the Knight Foundation’s Prototype Fund. PPF will use the funding to further develop AskThem for use by media organizations whose readers can then ask questions and receive answers from public figures.
In Tunisia, Al Bawsala launched “Marsad Budget,” a platform that promotes budgetary transparency by displaying spending data from government ministries, the President of the Republic, and the National Constituent Assembly. The site is also devoted to improving citizens understanding of budgetary issues with “Focus” pages that explore various public finance issues.
In Ukraine, with parliamentary elections nearing, CHESNO and the civic initiative RPR held a dialogue with MPs from eight political parties and proposed a framework for reforming the country’s new parliament. Since Euromaidan, RPR has already helped to pass 12 bills in parliament, including one on access to information, while CHESNO continues to focus on the need for greater transparency of candidates, political parties, and their financing.
In Denmark, the parliament launched an open API that offers information from the parliamentary website in a machine readable format.
In India, Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS), as part of the RTI Assessment and Advocacy Group (RAAG), published a nationwide assessment on the implementation of the Right to Information Act.
In the Netherlands, the coordinating minister for open data informed the Open State Foundation that the government will conduct a data inventory and publish its results in the spring of 2015. The decision follows Open State’s submission of five recommendations for digital transparency to the parliament and all government ministers in September.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Center for Civic Initiatives (CCI) initiated a campaign against the politicization of administrative appointments in government. The campaign called for politicians to sign pre-election statements that commit to a more transparent and competitive process in public sector employment, as well as passage of a law that defines which positions are political. The campaign website hosts an interactive database on political positions where citizens can contribute information.
In Georgia, Transparency International Georgia highlighted the importance of legislative transparency on the International Day of Democracy by urging parliament to adopt and improve a vote tracker application and to work with civil society to improve its features, including use of unique identifiers to track laws through the legislative process and making all votes and draft laws public, whether or not they are signed into law.
In Ghana, the Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) is monitoring preparations and seeking to increase civil society participation in the 2014-2017 Medium Term Development Plans (MTDPs) in order to ensure transparency, accountability and the inclusion of marginalized groups in the process.
In Pakistan, the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency (PILDAT) produced an analysis that ranks provincial assemblies based on 10 performance indicators, including working hours, attendance, websites of the assemblies, timely formation of standing committees, and inner governmental relations.
In Australia, the OpenAustralia Foundation launched a new site, They Vote For You, that enables users to find out how their representatives in parliament vote on issues they care about. For a longer description of the project, check out Matthew Landauer’s post on the blog.
In Cambodia, the Committee For Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia (COMFREL) and other CSOs offered recommendations on amendments to the internal regulations of the National Assembly after a framework for basic principles on transparency of the parliamentary process was established by the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) in July.
In Uganda, Parliament Watch Uganda submitted an idea to the Global Innovation Competition for a virtual tracker to promote responsiveness and accountability of MPs to their constituents.
In South Africa, People’s Assembly, a project of Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG), has produced infographics on a number of different topics related to parliament, several of which are displayed on their Twitter page.
Parliamentary monitoring organizations in Montenegro, Kosovo, and Indonesia endorsed the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. The PMO community welcomes the endorsement and support of the Network for Affirmation of the Civil Sector (MANS), GAP Institute for Advanced Studies (GAP), and the Center for Regional Studies and Information (PATTIRO). Furthermore, translations of the Declaration are now available in Serbian and Albanian.
Other related news:
In France, Henri Verdier became the country’s first Chief Data Officer, the first position of its kind in Europe. While Verdier was previously in charge of the state’s open data policy as Director of Etalab, he will now ensure the use of data within the administration to improve public policy.
In Finland, after collecting 50,000 signatures each, all six citizen initiatives introduced to parliament have failed consideration based on technical grounds.
In Italy, a new platform called Parelon was developed to crowdsource legislation for the Regional Council of Lazio. More than 50 proposals have already been presented on the platform, which aims to focus peoples’ attention on the content of legislation rather than political party barriers.
Open Knowledge launched the Global Open Data Index, a project that allows citizens to contribute information on the state of open data in their country. The index is intended to serve as “an up-to-date and reliable guide to the state of global open data for policy-makers, researchers, journalists, activists and citizens.”
The #OpenGovNow portal launched on International Day of Democracy. The portal hosts data from the Global Opening Government Survey and aims to generate greater awareness and engagement on open government issues and to serve as a resource to government representatives on “the primary importance and benefits of increased citizen participation in government decision-making.”
Resources:
The government of Brazil released an open data toolkit that illustrates the process of implementing an open data policy. While designed to help federal agencies implement open data policies, the toolkit is general enough to serve the purposes of other public institutions, including parliaments.
Democracy activist Pia Mancini recently gave a TED talk on upgrading democracy for the internet era. She discusses the development of her startup’s application, DemocracyOS, and the plans of Argentina’s Congress to use the platform on three upcoming pieces of legislation.
Events:
Mozilla Festival, or “MozFest,” will take place in London, October 24-26. The gathering brings together internet enthusiasts to discuss, explore and build new projects on the web.
The 8th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICEGOV) will take place October 27-30 in Guimarães, Portugal. The conference focuses on the impact of digital technology on public governance in the post-2015 development agenda and includes numerous tracks and sessions germane to the parliamentary openness community.
g0v Summit 2014 will take place November 8-9 at the Academia Sinica in Taipei. The program includes 29 sessions with speakers from around the world addressing topics including open parliament, participatory democracy, civic technologies, and open data. The second day features an unconference.
Parly Hack 2014, a UK Parliament Hackathon, will be held November 8-9. The Parliament’s digital services division is partnering with the National Audit Office (NAO) and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to explore and build apps for data hosted on data.parliament.
The Open Government Partnership Regional Meeting for the Americas will take place in San José, Costa Rica on November 18-19, preceded by a Civil Society Day, which will take place on November 17.