News from the OpeningParliament.org community:
In Mexico, Visión Legislativa took on the task of reviewing fast track legislation and the legislative process as established by la Ley Orgánica del Congreso. The article gives a brief overview of some of the best pieces of legislation between the years 1917 and 2000. Visión Legislativa also recently published a history of legislative elections and political parties.
SayIt, a new component of the Poplus network, launched this week. The goal of Poplus, which mySociety and Ciudadano Inteligente founded, is to collaboratively build pieces of technology that make it quicker and cheaper for people around the world to build websites and apps designed to empower citizens.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Centre for Civil Initiatives reports that parliamentarians and citizens participated in 27 public meetings in 2013, providing a forum for parliamentarians and citizens to talk about the current situation on a given topic.
In Georgia, Transparency International Georgia issued a statement urging the Georgian Parliament not to vote for the postponement of a new rule related to witness interrogation during investigations, a process seen as unconstitutional.
In the United States, the Sunlight Foundation, with partners, continued to work on lobbying disclosure by supporting reform activities in Israel and the EU. GovTrack.us launched a new feature to “Call Congress!” to the web platform, and discussed how to modernize bill text.
In Croatia, GONG wrote an article on issues that most incited citizens to write to Parliament over the past year, evidence that the citizens of Croatia remain involved in monitoring their parliament. Further, in honor of the 10th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act and the election of the first Information Commissioner, GONG released another article examining citizen’s ability to access information.
In Pakistan, PILDAT published an overview their recent event on lessons learned from the consolidation of democracy in Turkey.
Other related news:
In Central Europe, Google partnered with with Techsoup Global to support online projects driving forward good governance in Romania, the Czech Republic, and in Slovakia. Techsoup Global, in partnership with the Slovak Center for Philanthropy, recently held a social-startups awards ceremony called Restart Slovakia 2013 in Bratislava. A list of winning projects can be found at Google’s Europe Policy Blog here.
In Armenia, an FCPA blog post reported on bribery in the country’s courts, which is said to be common enough for judges to use an unofficial price list for kickbacks. According to the human rights ombudsman, bribery payments to judges amount to as much as 10 percent of the cost of lawsuits.
TechPresident published an article on Data Publica’s scrapathon, a new twist on the hackathon. Data Publica coined the term “scrapathon” to describe the new data scraping events they have begun hosting to give data a new and more purposeful life. A scrapathon provides developers and coders with the opportunity to work together in searching and scraping data off of websites using pre-existing web crawlers and scrapers or by developing their own software.
In Ghana, the Ghana Center for Democratic Development and the German Agency for International Cooperation held a three day workshop for civil society organizations on policy advocacy and engagement. The workshop taught participants the concept of policy advocacy and engagement, public policy making, influencing processes, how to plan effective advocacy campaigns using a wide range of policy communication, and other advocacy tools.
In Cambodia, COMFREL released a report analyzing data on views of Cambodian women’s political participation, focusing on the 2013 National Assembly elections.
Resources:
Government Information Quarterly published a new paper on the use of social media by government agencies in policy-making.
The Reuters Institute at Oxford University, United Kingdom released a study on transparency in politics and the media.
Chi Onwurah, a British MP, reviewed the book Digital Government @ Work: A Social Informatics Perspective.
A new paper from the Copenhagen Business School analyzes how to develop value from open government data, including through four different mechanisms: efficiency, innovation, transparency, and participation.
Yaryna Mykhyalyshyn released an infographic, developed on the useful platform visual.ly, on how to develop an open government project.
Events:
January 18-19: The PDF Liberation Hackathon, sponsored by The Sunlight Foundation, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews and others will have hack sites throughout the United States. Developers can also join remotely.
January 27-28: Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada (DFATD) will host the Open Data for Development Challenge to bring together Canadian and international technical experts and policy makers to generate new tools and ideas in open data and aid transparency in Montreal, Canada.
January 27-28: Code for Africa and the World Bank are convening the first in a series of planned roundtables with open data and digital democracy activists in Nigeria to help ensure that ordinary users’ voices are heard during planning of the country’s proposed national open data initiative.
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