Thanks to María Baron for filling the gap last week with some great news updates from Latin America. If you missed it, you can view her post here. Also, if you want to view the discussion that took place among the PMO community at the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki at the end of last month, a streaming version of the 90-minute session is now available online.
Onto some news:
In the U.S., a collaboration of eight nonprofit organizations released a report on what they call the “advocacy gap” – the disconnect between how activists mobilize to engage Congress and how Congressional staff say they should mobilize to be most effective. This is a survey of nearly 4,000 activists and top legislative staffers in Congress, with some very interesting conclusions. Also stateside, the Participatory Politics Foundation unveiled a new initiative to bring OpenGovernment.org down to the local level. Read more about it on the OpenCongress blog.
In Ireland, the parliament (Oireachtas) suspended their XML feed, effectively killing, at least temporarily, the PMO KildareStreet. Check out this blog post about this seemingly huge step backwards for the Irish parliament. After some backlash, it looks like KildareStreet and the Orieachtas are working out a solution, according to the most recent update on KildareStreet.com. Stay tuned for more news on this…
I’m not sure if this has already been sent out to the group in the many articles we’ve seen in the past few weeks on the Declaration, but In Mexico, an article was published which includes a look at the regional distribution of the signatories of the Declaration.
We’ve all seen the success that TI Bangladesh has had promoting the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, but they’ve also had remarkable success in many other areas, becoming a 265-person strong organization combating corruption and promoting transparency by engaging communities at the local level. Check out this piece from Transparency International’s blog on their work.
In South Africa, several groups launched a joint report detailing civil society’s work with the legislature. The report contains several case studies of specific groups’ work with the South African Parliament, as well as a number of ‘key insights’ which are applicable to all countries.
In Jordan, a survey of civil society organizations revealed the extent of the challenges that civil society faces in that country. The top obstacles are said to be governmental – bureaucracy, financial constraints, and administrative requirements – although networking among organizations was also listed as a challenge.
In Kyrgyzstan, the media was forcefully removed from a committee meeting of parliament last week. Efforts by the Kyrgyz Parliament to infringe on the rights of the media have led to rallies by the public as well as some positive, supportive statements from government officials.
Last week at the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki, the Vice President of the European Commission expressed strong support for open data and open access. Watch her speech here. Also recently, the European Commission reiterated its belief in the importance of civil society, pledging support to CSOs in partner countries in helping to enhance domestic transparency and accountability and inclusive policymaking.
In the UK, mySociety is starting an effort to create Hansards of local council meetings. They are asking for volunteers to help in the new initiative, hoping to get people to collect unofficial transcripts of their local councils in order to aid in developing software that records transcripts via voice recognition technology.
In Finland, the government has enabled the Open Ministry, an online method for citizens to come up with bills for the parliament to vote on. If they get 50,000 signatures, the citizen-authored bill goes to the floor of parliament for a vote. Read about the effort here.
In Iraq, parliamentarians and NGOs are working together to draft the country’s first law dealing with civil society.
Two more great articles appeared on the work of Al Bawsala in Tunisia, and their partnership with Abgeordnetenwatch from Germany. View them on MSN and Magharebia.
The Open Knowledge Foundation published a great guide to organizations who are doing open data work in India, including those doing data collection, data journalism, “techie” work, and policy. Take a look at their blog for the post.
And in Ghana and Mozambique, the fight continues to get their respective parliaments to pass a Right to Information bill.
Community member Grant Vergottini wrote a blog post on the LEX Summer School and Akoma Ntoso developers workshops he attended, which details some of the tools being used and developed for legislative information systems.
NDI’s tech blog, democracyworks, did a piece on innovative PMO websites, which includes a number of organizations who are members of this list.
Lastly, check out this (shorter) TED talk from Clay Shirky on How the Internet will (one day) transform government.
Please respond with your own news items!