It has been a busy few months for the global open parliament community! Below, we’ve compiled a collection of updates. With so much great work, we’re certain that we’ve missed some fantastic projects, initiatives, and events. As always, if you would like to see your work included in this News Brief, feel free to reach out to the site administrators on the contact page.

In case you missed it, Global Legislative Openness Week was a success around the world. More information can be found at OpenParlWeek.org, but highlights include:

• The Parliament of Georgia, the Legislative Openness Working Group, and a collection of local and international organizations organized a global legislative openness conference, entitled Committing to Openness: Parliamentary Action Plans, Standards, and Tools. The conference featured over 100 legislators, legislative staff, and civil society representatives from more than 30 countries who shared experiences advancing legislative openness and explored ways in which OGP can be most effectively leveraged to advance public access to legislative information and processes.
• Around the world, mySociety led a crowdsourcing campaign to collect structured, reusable data on politicians in 201 countries. This information is now public and available on their website.
• The Brazilian Chamber of Deputies launched a collection of new tech platforms to foster citizen engagement in the legislative process. To celebrate GLOW, the Chamber launched these new open source services for use outside Brazil.
• In Taiwan, Citizen Congress Watch (TWN) organized the 2015 International Conference on Congressional Reform and Watch, introduced for the first time in Taipei. Topics of discussion included best practices and experience sharing on congressional oversight and promoting transparency and reform in Congress. More information about the conference can be seen here.
• Open Knowledge Danmark, Foreningen Gennemsigt, and the Centre for Voting and Parties hosted an event on open parliamentary data in Denmark. The event, which was live streamed using Periscope, featured discussion of how best to make use of parliamentary data, how to turn it into usable information, and how to make it accessible to a broader audience. 

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Mexico, from Oct 27-29, the Open Government Partnership’s Global Summit convened over 1500 open government advocates from civil society, government, and parliament. Speakers and participants shared experiences from their respective countries and provided real examples of how openness can improve public services, drive economic growth, reduce poverty and make governments more accountable to the people they serve. For the first time, the OGP Summit featured a “track” on legislative openness, which included a number of interesting sessions and a dedicated side meeting for MPs. A blog post sharing more information on the Summit will be posted shortly.

In Argentina, the government made strides forward in opening access to public information when the Chamber of Appeals ruled in favor of Poder Ciudadano, Fundación Directorio Legislativo, and other groups in their request to access administrative decisions made by the Chamber of Deputies. This ruling requires the Chamber to make the results of administrative decisions public by publishing them on its website.

In Kenya, Mzalendo conducted a comprehensive assessment of the contributions that women MPs made to the work of Kenya’s 11th parliament. In addition to a formal report, Mzalendo also published an infographic, which includes a word cloud on issues women MPs most commonly discussed in parliament.

In Georgia, Transparency International Georgia revealed a new methodology to assess the degree to which a parliament adheres to the principles of the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. The methodology will first be applied to the Parliament of Georgia, though will be published for other groups to reuse.

In Costa Rica, ACCESSA and a coalition of parliamentary monitoring organizations worked with the Legislative Assembly of Costa Rica to develop an action plan on legislative openness. Among other commitments, the plan calls for the Assembly to develop a dedicated web portal for legislative information, hold a hackathon to explore tools that could be built with legislative data, and expand coverage of legislative activities on radio and television.

In the US, the Sunlight Foundation released the newest draft of the Declaration on Political Finance Openness, which provides an affirmative vision for an open political finance system. The Declaration is meant to be a work in progress as the Sunlight Foundation seeks continued input, and the document remains open for comment on their website. Moving forward, the Sunlight Foundation seeks to conduct continued outreach to stakeholders before the final document is launched with endorsements by the end of the year.

In Ghana, Penplusbytes supported the parliament’s Committee on Government Assurances in organizing a series of one-day forums in different cities across the country to provide the public and key stakeholders with the opportunity to engage with members of the committee. The “citizen engagement roadshow” has stopped in Ho, Tamale, and Twifo.

In Guatemala, Congreso Transparente, hosted a webinar on access to open data and tech tools for journalists on October 14. The event featured speakers from Costa Rica, Peru and Spain who spoke about their experiences.

In Bangladesh, with the aim of improving government transparency, Shujan (Citizens for Good Governance), created VoteBD. VoteBD gathers and publishes information on Bangladeshi politicians and electoral candidates. The tool is the first of its kind in Bangladesh to make voter registration records public.

Other related news:

Congratulations to the six winners of the IDRC grants for research on OGP! The grant is intended to mobilize the global community to deepen understanding of OGP and its potential impact. Keep your eyes peeled for the final research products.

The US Congress hosted its second congressional hackathon. According to the Sunlight Foundation, the hackathon hosted over 200 programmers, policy experts, congressional staffers and legislators to tackle legislative openness issues. The hackathon strove to analyze best ways to organize, share and disseminate newly available data, build new avenues for constituent participation, and organize institutional knowledge.

On the 3rd, 17th and 24th of October, Ciudadano Inteligente, in conjunction with a number of academic partners, held the second conference on Developing Latin America. The conference convened diverse teams of developers, designers, journalists, entrepreneurs to find innovative technological solutions to public problems in Latin America.

In Tanzania, Twaweza recently released a brief entitled Let the people speak: Citizens’ views on political leadership. The brief, which uses data from Sauti za Wananchi, Africa’s first nationally representative mobile phone survey, gathered data on political party preferences and other political considerations in the lead-up to the country’s national election.

Recently, 70 key members of the open government community traveled to Johannesburg, South Africa for Buntwani 2015. This year, Buntwani aimed to discuss the use of technology in creating accountable governments and empowered citizens. Organizers intended to use the regional workshop to serve as a “platform for reflection, analysis and candid dialogue" for ideas surrounding this topic.

Resources:

Open Knowledge Foundation created a guide to event planning for events centered around the Open Data Index. The manual seeks to provide guidance for those interested in hosting public events in the spirit of expanding knowledge of open data in their communities.

A group of open data activists produced the world’s first short film about open data, open government and open source. The film can be seen here.

Upcoming events:

The World Forum for Democracy will host its annual program this year in Strasbourg on the 18-20 of November, entitled “Freedom vs. Control: For a Democratic Response”.

International Anti-Corruption Day will take place on Wednesday, December 9.