One quick reminder before I share some interesting articles: comment on the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness and the accompanying commentary here. The document would benefit greatly from your input, including your own country’s parliamentary practices and progress towards openness. Also, if you’d like your organization to be associated with the Declaration, both on the web and in print, shoot me an email with your logo. Now onto the news:

In Tunisia, organizations that are members of the group OpenGovTN, including the PMO Al Bawsala, are launching formal complaints against the National Constituent Assembly for failing provide parliamentary information like voting and attendance records and commission reports, as required by law. Read more about that in a blog post from OpenGovTN and an article from the Tunis Afrique Press (both in French).

In the United Kingdom, the group MySociety announced that they have received a $2.9 million grant from the Omidyar Foundation to fund efforts to internationalize their websites and help organizations around the world to promote transparency and accountability in government by building their own websites and apps. Check out Tom Steinberg’s announcement on the MySociety blog or this article in techPresident to read about it.

The work of PMO Transparencia Hacker in Brazil was highlighted in an article in techPresident written by PMO community member Greg Michener. The article details the open government movement in Brazil, specifically noting the Hackers’ work with a member of the Chamber of Deputies to help draft “open-data-friendly” provisions of the Freedom of Information Law passed in 2009. Nearly all of the Hackers’ recommendations on open data and transparency issues were incorporated into the final law.

Pakistan: Citizens Forum: Pildat to evaluate Punjab assembly performance (Business Recorder)

Iraq: Kurdistan Regional Parliament, civil society set road-map to improve cooperation (All Iraq News)

European Union: European Parliament to share amendment web tool as open source (European Commission)

Austria: Austria puts spotlight on politicians’ finances (TrustLaw)

Bangladesh: TIB urges UNCAC to involve civil society in review process (Financial Express)

Kyrgyzstan: UN to help Kyrgyz fight corruption (Central Asia Online)

Kenya: MPs ‘Mischief’ Infuriates Civil Society (allAfrica)

Ghana: Ghana’s democracy lacks transparency oxygen – Nana Oye (GhanaWeb)

Nigeria: Court Orders Release Of Information On Legislators’ Salaries And Allowances From 2007 To 2011(Sahara Reporters)

USA: Demand a more open-source government: Beth Noveck at TEDGlobal 2012 (TED)

Although not a website about parliaments, still worth mentioning, a group in Egypt, Zabatak, has created a new website to monitor newly-elected President Morsi by tracking his campaign promises and work in the first 100 days of his presidency. Take a look at the new website, Morsi Meter.

Similarly in Hungary, a new website, KiMitTud, was just introduced which will allow citizens to more easily submit Freedom of Information requests. It uses mySociety's Alaveteli platform. 

One more piece of non-parliamentary news. Our friend Felipe Heusser and his organization Ciudadano Inteligente, which does great parliamentary monitoring work in Chile, was featured in an article on another one of his projects, Peepol.TV. It’s an interesting read, check it out here.

Lastly, my colleague Andrew has put together a Twitter feed for the PMO community – check it out here.

Thanks to many of you for providing your own news updates this past week – as always, please reply to this email with anything you’d like to share. For those of you going to Paris for the Open Legislative Data Conference held by Regards Citoyens and Sciences Po on July 6-7 (read more about it here), I look forward to seeing many of you there.