News from the parliamentary monitoring community:
In Ghana, CDD Ghana organized a meeting of African parliamentary monitoring organizations that focused on regional approaches to parliamentary monitoring and considered how a regional network of parliamentary openness advocates and champions can be most effectively leveraged to advance legislative transparency and citizen participation.
Also in Ghana, the Parliament of Ghana in collaboration with Penplusbytes and with support from the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) launched the “Connecting Citizens to Parliament” digital platform. The project aims to provide citizens with another avenue through which they can engage with MPs and monitor government performance on certain issues. Citizens can engage with members on the web-platform or via SMS, mobile app, or social media.
In Morocco, the country’s first web platform for public engagement with parliament is off to a strong start. Nouabook has built a solid user base and a number of MPs are responding to citizens’ questions on the platform. Over 40% of the questions posted on the platform have been answered by the member of parliament in question.
In Italy, OpenPolis and ActionAid launched a web-based advocacy tool called U-Act that allows citizens to enter into a dialogue with policy makers. U-Act allows users to submit and support new ideas, which are then sent to members of parliament.
In Kenya, a joint initiative of the Parliamentary Initiatives Network in partnership with and Transparency International Kenya, Kenyans for Peace with Truth and Justice (KPTJ) and Africa Centre for Open Governance (AfriCOG) recently came out with a study titled, “Towards Hazy Horizons.” The study found that that the slow pace of institutional reform and low levels of public awareness and engagement is slowing the implementation of constitutional provisions in chapter six of the constitution.
In the UK, mySociety is helping constituents track how responsive their MP is on WriteToThem, a tool that allows users to quickly look up who represents them and send those representatives a message. Here, mySociety ranks MPs based on how responsive they were to messages sent using the tool. Some MPs have responded only a handful of times while others have responded to all messages sent over WriteToThem.
In Uganda, Parliament Watch Uganda launched a virtual tracker that monitors the parliament and provides both data and expert analysis. On February 26, 2015, the initiative organized the #MPsEngage Twitter chat with women MPs to discuss how women can be more effectively incorporated into the legislative process. Three audiences participated in the chat in real time: the people of Gulu in Northern Uganda, female members of parliament, and Uganda’s general social media audience.
In Pakistan, Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN) launched a portal to inform the people about the activities of the legislature and the lawmakers they elect. It will enable the citizens to access the debates, deliberations, and decisions in the National Assembly, the Senate and the provincial assemblies, as well as the work being done by individual elected representatives.
In Mexico, Fundar launched the second edition of Curul 501, an internet platform that promotes access to information, legislative openness, and civic engagement.
In Greece, techPresident featured an article looking at the work of Vouliwatch, a Greek political monitoring and accountability website, and the challenges it faces in being able to effectively monitor the Greek Parliament.
Other related news:
In the UK, the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy released a report detailing their findings, which outlines recommendations on how parliamentary democracy should respond to the opportunities and challenges presented by technology. Among its conclusions, the Commission recommended the formal adoption of the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness by the House of Commons.
The UK parliament also named a digital director to lead the new Parliamentary Digital Service (PDS), which will devise and oversee a digital and technology strategy for both houses of parliament. The creation of the PDS was first recommended by mySociety in their review of parliament’s online services.
The Congress of Deputies in Spain recently created a Tumblr blog so constituents can follow the 2015 congressional debate on the state of the nation. Built using a simple, easy to use website, the platform helps foster better understanding of parliamentary debate and procedure.
The U.S. House of Representatives adopted new rules for the 114th Congress and took an unprecedented step forward: the House committed to broadening the availability of legislative documents in machine-readable formats. The Congressional Data Coalition offered additional recommendations for the House to consider.
Croatian Parliament Speaker Josip Leko recently announced that the parliament will set up a task force which will draw up a code of ethics for deputies in parliament.
Resources:
mySociety recently released a report, titled “The Third Sector and Online Citizen Empowerment: the Case of mySociety,” that evaluates the impact that mySociety’s tools have had on their users. The report is part of a wider Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded study that has been conducted by researchers at the University of Manchester over the course of one year (2013-14).
The Sunlight Foundation, with support from the Open Data for Development (OD4D) Research Fund of the OGP Open Data Working Group, is facilitating a project to gather examples of the social impact of open data using reported case studies via a crowdsourced spreadsheet.
In this podcast, Dan Swislow, Senior Partnership Officer at the National Democratic Institute, explains the important role that legislatures play in the open government and open data conversation.
Events:
The Government of Tanzania will host the second OGP Africa Regional Meeting on May 20-21, 2015 in Dar es Salaam. The theme of the meeting is “Enhancing Accountability through Open Governance” and will include a civil society day on May 19.
Harvard’s Ash Center and The OpenGov Foundation are hosting a series of events in the US called #Hack4Congress. The “not-just-for-technologists” hackathons will bring together political scientists, technologists, designers, lawyers, researchers, Congressional staffers, and lawmakers to create new digital tools, policy innovations, and other solutions to address problems facing the US Congress. The next session takes place in Washington, DC, April 29-May 1, 2015.
Open State Foundation in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands hosted GCCS-Unplugged, an “unconference” where participants set the agenda and addressed challenges facing online freedom, transparency and security. The event took place on April 17. More information about the event can be found here.
ePaństwo Foundation hosted its annual event, Personal Democracy Forum (PDF), an international conference on how technology is changing politics, government and civic life. The forum took place in Warsaw, Poland on April 16-17.
Recently, mySociety organized and hosted The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, a day of conversations considering what impact civic technology may be having on politics and how that impact can be expanded. For a few conclusions, check out this post by the Indigo Trust.