This post was collaboratively written by Jogi Poikola and Markus Laine of Open Knowledge Finland, James McKinney of Open North, and Scott Hubli, Jared Ford, and Greg Brown of National Democratic Institute.  

At this year’s Open Knowledge Festival – a biennial gathering of open government advocates – there was considerable interest in moving toward greater standardization of APIs (application programming interface) relating to government decision-making processes. Web APIs help promote an open architecture for sharing content and data between communities and applications. Standardization of APIs for government decision-making data would allow tools built by civic innovators or governments to analyze or visualize data about government decision-making to be used across multiple jurisdictions, without needing to re-program the tool to accommodate differing data formats or ways of accessing the data.   

Most government decision-making procedures involve similar processes (meetings, requests for public comment, etc.), decision-points (committee hearings, committee meetings, plenary sessions, etc.) and supporting documentation (agendas, draft legislation, information on voting records, etc.). Standardizing the ways that these types of information are structured allows tools for visualizing data about open government decision-making to be used across jurisdictions, as well as facilitating comparison of data and information.  

To discuss the state of play with respect to open government decision-making APIs, Open Knowledge Finland, Open North, and the National Democratic Institute organized a session at the Open Knowledge Festival 2014 in Berlin to explore the possibilities for moving toward a global standard for APIs that deal with data on government decision-making.

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This post was authored by Alisha Green.

Open meetings laws are an essential element of open government. Ensuring public access to government decision-making processes can help create transparency, allow for accountability, and encourage public participation in the choices being made on the public’s behalf.

For open meetings laws to live up to their full potential, they need to reflect the opportunities provided by recent advances in technology. Governments are already starting to update public records laws to take advantage of these kinds of advances, and open meetings laws are overduefor undergoing similar revisions.

Open meetings generate an abundance of public records, including agendas, minutes, votes, and more. Sharing these records online as open data is becoming increasingly easy and financially feasible. This opportunity is often missed by local governments, but that’s starting to change. States, counties, cities and towns across the country are finding ways to use open data to bolster open meetings, sharing information online about decision-making processes in easily accessible and reusable formats. Open data is helping in ways beyond making information more easily accessible, too. It’s also inviting the public to participate in the decision-making process in new ways – a key component of any open government initiative.

Recommendations for using open data to improve open meetings

Just as the public records process is being updated to take advantage of new technologies, it’s time for an overhaul of how governments approach open meetings. Some of the key principles of open data can be applied to broad improvements of open meetings policies. Here are some of the ways open data can be used to help bolster open meetings:

1. Post the open meetings law online

Open meetings laws are public accountability and access policies, and as such it makes sense to post these laws online where anyone can easily review their rights to access government. Posting these laws online also demonstrates that open meetings are part of the values, goals and mission of the government for keeping the public informed and engaged.

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Some time ago, I surveyed all national parliaments in the world to see whether they record and publish results of plenary voting. In this post, I look at how exactly parliamentary voting data is provided. I also collected information about as much parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) as I could find and to see whether and how they help open voting data up.

My sample includes 283 legislative chambers from 200 jurisdictions, mostly UN member states and some other territories (e.g. Taiwan, Hong Kong). There are two nation states included that no longer exist but voting results from their parliaments are still around: Czechslovakia (1991-1992) and the Fourth French Republic (1946-1958).

A chart below shows that knowing how your MPs decide is sadly still relatively rare worldwide. Only 90 legislative chambers publish at least some voting results. Moreover, many of these chambers publish results of very few votes. For example, about 20 votes per year are recorded in German Bundestaag while the number is well over 2,000 in the Czech Chamber of Deputies where every vote is taken as a roll call by default. Transparency of voting is generally lower in Africa and Asia and among non-democratic countries. But even in some old democracies, almost no voting data exist (e.g. in Austria, France, New Zealand or the Netherlands).

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Law is Code!

Over the last few years, a number of people have explored the idea of inverting Lawrence Lessig’s metaphor “code is law”, looking at the evolution of laws through the lens of coding tools. The parliamentary process is indeed so similar to a collaborative software development workflow that it is only natural to try and use a version control tool such as git to track individual legislative changes.

The analogy between both processes is deep: in each case, there is a group of people collaborating on a textual artifact (bill or program source code), proposing changes (amendments or patches), adopting or rejecting them (through votes or pull requests), and iterating until a stable, public version is made available (by promulgation or release). This new paradigm to think about legislation paves the way for new, innovative approaches of law-tracking. Some exciting work has already been made, most notably in Germany: the BundesGit project invites citizens to propose their own legal modifications as “pull requests”, and Gregor Aisch produced an unprecedented visualization of modifications to one law over 40 years of amendments.

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