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Posts tagged "Africa"

PMO News Update Vol. 25

Posted July 18, 2013 at 9:28am by dustinpalmer

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Spain, Fundación Ideas and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) hosted a number of organizations in a discussion on the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, which included participation by Miguel Angel Gonzalo, webmaster of the Spanish Chamber of Deputies, and Michal Skop of KohoVolit.eu . Participants discussed various aspects of the Declaration, in particular how the Spanish parliament meets or fails to meet its provisions, including on issues of access to information and using search engines and alert services. Qué Hacen Los Diputados posted an informative article about the Declaration in the Spanish context (for current affairs, see this blog post) and also an article on the Spanish legislative process more generally. Qué Hacen Los Diputados is currently fundraising to expand their website and services. Finally, La Fundación Ciudadana Civio called for political parties and the Spanish Congress to make their finances public.

In Latin America, the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency (LALT Network), alongside International IDEA Peru and others participated in a seminar on information technologies and citizen engagement with parliaments. Participants discussed turning technologies into civic education, the concept of “digital citizenship”, and efforts toward parliamentary transparency and integrity. The presentation by Manuel Arís on the mission of the LALT Network is available here. For more information on transparency efforts in the region by LALT and OpeningParliament.org, see this recent article by Ernesto Diaz Diego-Iturbe. The Nieman Journalism Lab recently covered open data and transparency efforts in the region.

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Why Africa needs open legislatures

Posted January 2, 2013 at 1:35pm by veitopblog-blog

This post was co-written by Peter Veit, Interim Director of the Institutions and Governance Program at the World Resources Institute (WRI), and Gilbert Sendugwa, Coordinator and Head of Secretariat for the Africa Freedom of Information Centre. It originally appeared on the WRI Insights blog, available here.

Open government requires an open executive branch, an open legislature, and an open judiciary. Historically, however, global attention to government transparency and access to information has focused on the executive branch.

But this may finally be changing. In April of this year, 38 civil society organizations from around the world convened in Washington, D.C. and agreed to work together to advance open parliaments. In September, more than 90 civil society organizations from more than 60 countries launched the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness in Rome.

Civil society attention on lawmakers and legislatures is critically important—especially in Africa, where parliaments have long worked behind closed doors (most legislatures on the continent are parliaments). Transparency is needed for civil society to hold legislators accountable for their decisions and actions, and to ensure they are responsive to the needs and concerns of their constituents.

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PMO News Update: Vol. 16

Posted December 11, 2012 at 12:03pm by danswislow

News in parliamentary monitoring:

In Liberia, Declaration supporter NAYMOTE began launching a series of report cards for legislators. The report cards, which rate MPs on the deliverables provided to their constituencies during the past legislative session, received local media attention in MPs’ districts. (Also check out this guest post from NAYMOTE on the OpeningParliament blog.)

OpeningParliament partners in the United States from the Sunlight Foundation and GovTrack.us (and others) made ‘scraping’ tools for legislative data available on Github, open source. Check out this article from O'Reilly Media which includes an interview with Eric Mill from Sunlight, who assisted in developing the tools.

In Spain, the Senate released an update of their official website at a cost of about €500,000, with about half of that going to pay for licenses for proprietary code. In response, open source activists recreated the Senate’s website at a tiny fraction of the cost, using open source code. Read about this effective demonstration of the economic savings of using open source software here.

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Exploring the possibilities for using the Declaration (Part 2)

Posted November 29, 2012 at 12:22pm by danswislow

This is Part 2 of a blog post on how PMOs are using the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. You can view Part 1 here.

The first part of this post took a look at some of the ways that parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) around the world have been using the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness to enhance their efforts to advocate for democratic reform in their home countries. These are still early days for this new network of PMOs, and the Declaration is only one small piece of a much broader set of efforts led by many different actors.

Yet, there is reason to be optimistic about the contribution of the Declaration. What started as an idea by a small group of PMOs moved forward fairly quickly from an initial conference in May, to collaboration among a broader group of PMOs over the summer, to a global launch at the 2012 World e-Parliament Conference in Rome in September, to now more than 100 supporting partners from all regions of the world sharing in the the initiative. PMOs have begun successfully introducing this work to parliamentarians and parliamentary staff on an international stage, while using it to enhance their work at home.

While advocacy at the international level – engaging international organizations and parliamentary events – will continue to be important, real impact will likely come more from the effective use of international solidarity among PMOs and the Declaration to reinforce the efforts of individual PMOs at the national and regional level. Great potential also lies in the ability to rapidly exchange knowledge and information on the issues that the Declaration espouses.

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