News from the OpeningParliament.org community:
In Spain, the PMO Civio launched a new project called Quién Manda, or “Who Rules?” The project aims to monitor the interactions of Spanish politicians and officials with corporate leaders by an innovative photo-tagging scheme. Thus far, they’ve identified over 2500 relationships. Recently, a Sunlight Foundation team member worked with Civio in the lead up to the launch. There is still an active crowd-funding campaign for the initiative on Goteo.
Elsewhere in Spain, a Spanish lawmaker held an attempt at direct democracy related to a transparency bill, a vital effort given Spain’s recent ranking of 75 out of 96 countries on access to information issues. Last month, the Masters of Media project commented on the Spanish status quo and Que Hacen Los Diputados discussed what the Congress needs to provide to ensure transparency.
In Pakistan, PILDAT released a number of reports, including on: the first meeting of a senate parliamentary friendship group on Afghanistan; the first 100 days of governance at the national and provincial levels; and two reports on the Pakistan-Afghanistan Parliamentary dialogues.
In Venezuela, Transparencia Venezuela released a report on the nation’s budget for the first half of 2013, and condemned corruption in the country and noted the role of civil society in combatting it. Meanwhile Entorno Parlamentario discussed key upcoming bills and opposition to an anti-corruption law.
In Burkina Faso, the parliamentary monitoring website Nos Deputes debuted, featuring information like MP profiles, committee activities, and details from plenary sessions. It is modeled off of the highly successful Nos Deputes effort in France.
In Jordan, the Al-Hayat Center for Civil Society Development, alongside a coalition of CSOs under the Rased banner released a report on the performance and activities of MPs. It is available in English on the website of the Global Network of Domestic Election Monitors (GNDEM)
In Romania, the IPP commented on a decision by the Senate to record individual votes on legislation.
In Chile, Chile Transparente reported on municipal corruption, the government of Chile’s invitation to civil society to engage on the Open Government Partnership, and its continued efforts to improve transparency in political campaigns.
In Croatia, the PMO GONG reflected on transparency and democracy, and reported on efforts to release public information.
Other related news:
The Open Knowledge Foundation continues its efforts to assess the state of open government through its open data census. Martin Tisne, director of policy for the Omidyar Network discussed the importance of open data on the OKF blog. Last month OKF held OKCON in Geneva, Switzerland. A number of articles on the conference are available here and attendees re-launched an open legislation working group. One project that emerged was an attempt to rank government websites on their openness, using principles from the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness.
The popular software development service Github announced a new effort to “make government better, together.” The website - government.github.com - will showcase efforts of public servants and civic hackers to open government.
In Russia, the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow and CSO Information Culture released a report on the recent open data initiative by the Russian government. Its findings include: a number of key data sets have yet to be published; a number of federal authorities have yet to implement the open data plan in accordance with the road map; and the publication of data mostly adheres to the publication requirements, although it includes regular sources of error. The report is available in Russian and English.
In Nigeria, Ventures-Africa released a lengthy article on technology and good governance efforts in the country. Meanwhile, the Guardian explored how technology could empower accountability in Africa.
In Estonia, a new website to gather citizen opinions about various legislative issues was launched.
In South Korea, the mayor of Seoul backed creative “participatory public artwork” to facilitate conversations between citizens and the city government.
Resources:
In the United States, NDI’s Political Parties team released a new paper on political parties and policy development. It features case studies from parties in South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, Belgium, Canada, Mexico, the Philippines, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, and France, which may be of interest to PMOs working with political parties.
The United Kingdom House of Commons released a new iPad app to publish the daily business of the House, including the Order Paper. The House of Commons has previously released a “My Constituency” app.
Michael Manoochehri, author of upcoming book “Data Just Right”, offers a short primer on data science skills.
A new data scraping tool - Import.io - will allow non-coding journalists to pull data from websites.
The popular “data journalism handbook” is now available in Czech, thanks to a translation by Otakar Motejl Fund.
TechPresident partnered with the engine room to host a skillshare on citizen reporting strategies, which may be of interest to PMO groups.
Our friends at the Demworks blog highlight a new report on domain attacks on civil society websites.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released a guide on how to unearth public records.
A team of researchers from the University of Potsdam and the INSET Research & Advisory organization released an article on “social media analytics for future oriented policy making.”
Events:
October 31 - November 1: The Open Government Partnership (OGP) annual conference will take place in London, England. The event will include presentations by seven winners of the “Bright Spots” competition. TechPresident will report on the event proceedings via a liveblog. A recent article in the Guardian discussed why journalists need the OGP and why open government must be more than better service delivery, the Sunlight Foundation discussed opportunities and limitations, and a number of civil society representatives released an open letter to the UK Prime Minister.
Note: The Open Knowledge Foundation will collaborate with OGP to host a civil society pre-conference on October 30.
November 16 - 17: Just in time for Parliament Week, there will be a Parliament Hackathon in the United Kingdom. Categories include: increasing participation, increasing interest, learning about the activities of MPs, and learning about the activities of the parliament broadly.
November 23 - 29: The World Forum for Democracy will host a conference on “Re-wiring democracy: Connecting Institutions and Citizens in the Digital Age” in Strasbourg, France.
January 17 - 18, 2014: Stanford University will organize a conference on “technology, accountability, and democracy” alongside the University of Mumbai in Mumbai, India. Participants may register to observe, participate, and/or present a paper or project. Presenters who wish to be considered for financial assistance must register by November 1. More details are available here.
Recent Blog Posts:
How to know the US Senate better through data visualization (October 24)
Why Kenya’s open data portal is failing - and why it can still succeed (October 10)
