News from the parliamentary monitoring community:
This section is devoted to news from parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) listed as ‘Supporting Organizations’ of the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness and OpeningParliament.
In Peru, work from Asociación Civil Transparencia has been highlighted recently in the media. The publication La Republica cited figures from a recent Transparencia report that showed a large portion of the Peruvian population not feeling represented by their legislator. In another article, the organization’s Secretary General talked about the need to balance transparency and accountability with providing MPs the resources they need to complete their job.
The Israeli PMO Hasadna’s project Open Knesset was profiled in a recent piece in TechPresident, which detailed the website’s success in using monitoring information on MPs to inform voters in recent elections.
In Montenegro, the Center for Democratic Transition released a list of eight recommendations for improving governance and transparency in the country’s parliament. View it here.
In Taiwan, Citizen Congress Watch (CCW) announced that the previous year’s congress was ranked ‘useless’ after passing only about 10 percent of the legislation passed in previous years. CCW also announced the top ten news items about the legislature from the previous year. Check out the Taipei Times coverage of CCW’s report.
In Spain, Qué hacen los diputados posted a blog article about the Spanish Parliament’s non-response to their inquiries about the salaries and travel spending of members of parliament entitled, “We have a right to know.”
In Ukraine, Chesno continued to get press about their exposure of parliamentarians illegally double voting. View a more in-depth news article about the recent issue from The Epoch Times.
The Tunisian PMO Al Bawsala released a YouTube video promoting its work to monitor the Tunisian Parliament. Check it out below.
The Centre for Legislative Research and Advocacy’s executive director published an editorial in The Hindu in India, questioning the accountability and democratic legitimacy of un-elected legislators.
In Germany, the founder of Parliament Watch, Gregor Hackmack, recently spoke about the new transparency laws in Hamburg in a talk called “How to further transparency by law.” View it below.
Other related news:
In Rwanda, the New Times published a positive review of the recent year in Parliament.
The New York Times reported that in Russia, a recently deceased member of parliament suspiciously voted 31 times after his death.
In the United States, House floor summaries are now available in a bulk, XML format, which you can read about on TechPresident, as are House bills, as discussed in a release from the Government Printing Office. Also check out this run down of the progress made on transparency in the last Congress by PMO community member, Joshua Tauberer.
In the UK, the Guardian published an article that details research into why the public “hates” members of parliament.
In Serbia, an article was written spotlighting the “hardest working” members of parliament – those who spoke the most in plenary and appeared the most during the parliamentary session.
Resources:
Rufus Pollock from the Open Knowledge Foundation, a PMO network member, details how to archive Twitter posts in a recent blog post.
Tiago Peixoto from the World Bank posted a list of academic reading suggestions on his blog relating to the intersection of participation and technology. Tiago’s blog is a consistent resource for academic material on this subject, often relating strongly to the work of PMOs.
In addition to the blog post from Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation earlier this week, Sunlight also published a comprehensive list of suggestions for Congressional committee websites.
Recent blog posts:
Open parliament discussion at OGP regional meeting (Jan 9)
5 things members of Congress should do to be more transparent (Jan 8)
Why Africa needs open legislatures (Jan 2)
Don’t forget to watch the OGP regional meeting of the Americas’ panel on open parliament tomorrow at 9:30am EST, webcast live here.