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Posts tagged "Albania"

OpenParl News Brief: January 19, 2016

Posted January 18, 2016 at 7:00am by hollyluundi

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Afghanistan, the Free & Fair Election Forum of Afghanistan (FEFA) released its six-month report on parliamentary activities. Findings of the report include the number of plenary and committee sessions held, the number of laws approved, positive developments and shortcomings, as well as recommendations for improvement. The report is published during a critical period in Afghanistan, with  the government in the midst of extended political gridlock preventing the enactment of much needed reforms. FEFA also signed a MoU with the Meshrano Jirga, the upper house of parliament, to conduct a similar assessment, with aims to increase public awareness on parliament’s activities and strengthen the level of cooperation between parliament and civil society.

In Costa Rica, the Alliance for Open Assembly, which includes ACCESA, Abriendo Datos, Costa Rica Íntegra, Iplex, Proledi, and Ojo al Voto, partnered with the Fundación Directorio Legislativo to foment major strides toward openness within the Costa Rican legislature. Together they created and signed a commitment seeking to promote openness, transparency, and accountability. The commitment includes a variety of different components, each working to counter the existing lack of trust in Costa Rican institutions. This commitment combined with the drafting of an action plan for legislative opening seek to strengthen and enable “a more democratic democracy.”

In Mexico, for the tenth anniversary of the Collective for Transparency campaign, Fundar launched #ArmonizaTuLey, an initiative to monitor the process of harmonizing state laws with the new federal regulatory framework for transparency and access to information. With the approval of the constitutional reform in 2013 and the General Act in 2014, Mexico has set up a robust framework that safeguards these rights. Fundar reports that while the deadline for adoption of the new regulatory framework is fast approaching, 29 states in Mexico still have not completed this obligation. The Collective for Transparency calls on legislators to fulfill their legal obligation of harmonizing state laws, respect this timeline for action, and engage citizens in this effort.

In Kenya, Mzalendo Trust announced the second People’s Shujaaz Awards to recognize Parliamentarians for championing issues of high public interest in the National Assembly and Senate in 2015. The final selection was made based on the legislators’ demonstration of leadership, factoring in the motions that were put forth, and statements and petitions they represented. The nominees were chosen in consultation with civil society groups under the Parliamentary Initiatives Network. While Mzalendo hopes that the People’s Shujaaz Awards helps to spotlight the positive achievements and key contributions made in Parliament, Mzalendo also issued a list of lessons learned, with recommendations for the legislature to strengthen its image, communicate its work more effectively with citizens, and find new ways for civic engagement using technology and social media.

In the US, the OpenGov Foundation received a $200,000 grant from the Rita Allen Foundation to support the continued development of an open-source platform to digitize Chicago’s legislative process over the next two years. In partnership with Chicago’s City Clerk’s office, the project aims to keep legislation in standardized, accessible formats, and allow citizens to better share feedback with their elected officials.

In India, PRS Legislative Research published two op-eds on legislative reform in major news outlets.  The authors called to question the effectiveness of India’s legislature, highlighting in particular the decrease in legislative productivity caused by disruptions and lapses in conduct by members. With a detailed breakdown of how time was used during parliamentary proceedings, the articles underscores the necessity of urgent reforms to restore both the Parliament’s role as an effective deliberative body, as well as citizens’ faith in Parliament as a representative institution as a whole.

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Survey on openness in Central and Eastern Europe reveals major problems with committees

Posted March 19, 2014 at 9:48am by kamilopblog

A recent survey on parliamentary data openness in Central and Eastern Europe shows that national parliaments in the region especially lack transparency of committees’ sessions. Transcripts of sessions, voting records or even sessions’ agenda are unavailable in many countries. The survey clusters the countries into two groups, with Czech Republic, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia and Slovakia being moderately open and Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo being much more closed.

Some time ago, I presented results of a global survey on voting data availability by KohoVolit.eu, a Czech and Slovak parliamentary monitoring organization (PMO). Recently, there has been another development in parliamentary data openness monitoring. NDI’s Western Balkan Legislative Strengthening Initiative conducted a comprehensive survey of nine Central and Eastern European parliaments. It is unique in many ways, mainly because the survey questionnaire was filled by parliamentary researches and not by PMOs, as it is usually the case.

The survey was based on the Declaration of Parliamentary Openness and focused on opportunities of citizens’ participation in the legislative process and parliamentary data openness. This section of the questionnaire contains questions on whether 48 types of parliamentary data are available on the official parliamentary website. It does not ask any further details (e.g. how many years of data are available or in what formats) and some questions could be more specific (e.g. whether voting records are available by name of individual MPs) but it draws a good rough picture of parliamentary openness in the region.

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A standardized API for parliamentary monitoring in Europe

Posted August 8, 2013 at 5:30am by vukaopblog-blog

Wouldn’t it be great if we could freely access all the relevant parliamentary information in the country we live in? Even better, wouldn’t it be great if we could easily compare and analyze all parliamentary information in the region we live in? It would allow us to learn about good practices in the region and would give us an excellent benchmark for our progress and achievements in our civic efforts aimed at opening up the parliaments. Such complex information would be a great tool that could aid in decision making in our civic activities, and would provide the evidence for our parliamentary advocacy initiatives.

Currently, no application in the region can provide us with such information - all our apps experience a language barrier when communicating with systems in other countries. Like people, apps need a language to communicate. Creating an API (application programming interface) standard would allow many apps in the region to communicate in the same language. Apps would be able to access information in other countries, and to use that information to make benchmarks and analysis. This way, we could make systematic and correct comparisons of the situation in various countries and use best practice examples to influence openness of the parliaments in our own countries.

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Case Study #2: mySociety & Alaveteli

Posted August 1, 2013 at 12:43pm by dustinpalmer

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OrganizationmySociety
Project: Alaveteli, a freedom of information request platform
Country: Uruguay, Brazil, Croatia, Spain, UK, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Hungary, New Zealand, Australia
Government Level: All levels, inclusive of private enterprises, universities, and other public information holders

OverviewAlaveteli is a platform designed to facilitate the submission of freedom of information requests to the relevant authority to improve access to information for all citizens.

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