This post was written by Maria Hermosilla and Julia Root and originally appeared on The GovLab’s blog. 

On September 24th, The GovLab held its third online global conference on #CrowdLaw. Practitioners from 16 countries discussed the challenges and lessons learned when crowdsourcing legislation and constitutions. The session including lightning talks by practitioners with projects from Austria, Brazil, Chile, Finland, United States, Morocco, Libya and Spain and then a broader group discussion on three themes:

• Outreach strategies
• Designing to overcome barriers; and
• Measuring impact.

The goal of the conference was to deepen our collective understanding of what works, what doesn’t, how to assess impact, and accelerate the implementation of more effective and legitimate participatory lawmaking practices.

The full video is available here. Featured speakers and projects included:

• PODEMOS, SPAIN – Victoria Alsina, visiting researcher at Harvard, is working with 5 leading politicians of the Spanish political party Podemos to research how they are using technology to increase citizen participation in politics from voting every four years to a more day to day basis. She discussed two tools: the Plaza Podemos, that is based on Reddit and is a place of contact and debate for their followers, organized by thematic and territorial circles. It is used regularly by 15,000 people. They also use Appgreefor massive brainstorm sessions and doing quick surveys and for approving proposals. They have had up to 60,000 participants voting on Appgree.

• NEOS, AUSTRIA – Josef Lentsch, Managing Director of Neos Lab and Karl-Arthur Arlamovsky from Austrian political party NEOS discussed the tools they are using to implement their vision of making politics more open and participatory. Thematic groups at a local, regional and national level composed by thousand of volunteer policy advisors draft policy proposals on “Policy Forge”, a customized collaborative drafting platform. Neos has a cockpit composed of tools such as a calendar, customer relation management system, wiki, meeting software, among others.

Click here to read more.

A few years back, Kamil Gregor published a post under the title “Visualizing politics: Network analysis of bill sponsors”. His post, which focused on the lower chamber of the Czech Parliament, showed how basic social network analysis can support the exploration of parliamentary work, by revealing the ties that members of parliament create between each other through the co-sponsorship of private bills.

As Kamil observed, this kind of research is heavily dependent on open legislative data, which does not exist for many parliaments. There has been, however, some amount of progress in that area – and even when parliaments do not develop open data portals, they often maintain quite detailed official websites.

In what follows, I would like to quickly report on a small research project that I have developed over the years, under the name “parlnet”.

Legislative data on bill co-sponsorship

This project looks at bill co-sponsorship networks in European countries. Many parliaments allow their members to co-sponsor each other’s private bills, which makes it possible to represent these parliaments as collaborative networks, where a tie exists between two MPs if they have co-sponsored legislation together.

This idea is not new: it was pioneered by James Fowler in the United States, and has been the subject of extensive research in American politics, both on the U.S. Congress and on state legislatures. Similar research also exists on the bill co-sponsorship networks of parliaments in Argentina, Chile andRomania.

Inspired by this research and by Baptiste Coulmont’s visualisation of the French lower chamber, I surveyed the parliamentary websites of the following countries:

• all 28 current members of the European Union ;
• 4 members of the EFTA: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland

This search returned 19 parliamentary chambers from 15 countries for which it was (relatively) easy to extract legislative data, either through open data portals like data.riksdagen.se in Sweden ordata.stortinget.no in Norway, or from official parliamentary websites directly.

From legislative data to network graph

After splitting the data into legislative periods separated by nationwide elections, I was able to draw a large collection of networks showing bill co-sponsorship in these 19 chambers. Here, for instance, is the network for the Belgian lower chamber during its 51st legislature (years 2003-2007):

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Germany, the Open Knowledge Festival took place in Berlin from July 15-17. A good summary of the event can be viewed here. Members of the OpeningParliament.org community that attended include Foundation ePaństwo, DATA Uruguay, Sunlight Foundation, Fundar, Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, KohoVolit, K-Monitor, Holder de Ord, Hvem Stemmer Hvad, Open Ministry, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, Open State Foundation, Open North, OpenKratio, Hasadna, mySociety, and Access Info.

Elsewhere, Parliament Watch recently announced an online survey that documents the positions of Germany’s 96 MEPs on important policy issues. In addition to the survey, the organization also collected voting behavior of the elected officials during the last parliamentary term.

In Greece, the Ministry of Administrative Reform and E-Government submitted the country’s Action Plan to the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The plan contains ambitious commitments on parliamentary openness and legislative transparency, including the introduction of a system for tracking bill changes, improvements in the usability and functionality of the parliament’s website, provision of historical parliamentary documents, and enhancements of social media policy.

In Ireland, the government launched data.gov.ie, an open data portal that currently supports 419 datasets. The Minister of Public Education and Reform announced the end of application fees for FOI requests. And the government approved the country’s Action Plan for OGP which includes several components to increase citizen participation during the pre-legislative process through consultation with committees and scrutiny of draft bills.

In France, Regards Citoyens initiated a crowdsourcing project that converted declarations of interests for all 925 MPs into open data. The declarations were previously scanned into PDFs by the High Authority on Transparency in Public Life (HATVP). The conversion of these files to open data brings the declarations into line with standards established in October 2013 by France’s law on the transparency of public life.

In Italy, OpenPolis and others have been drawing attention to the country’s need for an FOI law with the #FOIA4Italy campaign. Despite the growing momentum around FOI in recent years, there has been a lack of progress on the issue in parliament. FOIA4Italy plans to submit an FOIA bill based on legislation in countries with advanced access to information laws after crowdsourcing improvements from the Italian public.

In Tunisia, Al Bawsala unveiled a new project, Marsad Baladia, a platform that will monitor the activities of municipalities to generate greater citizen awareness before municipal elections scheduled for 2015. The project has already created a transparency index from the 24 municipalities it has so far observed.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In India, national elections closed on May 16, with Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party anticipated to win more than the 272 seats required for a parliamentary majority. In advance of the election, Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS) developed report cards for members of the Lok Sabha. The report cards provide citizens with information gathered through the Right To Information Act and other government websites and assess MP performance on factors like attendance and efforts to introduce new development within their districts. See here for more information on SNS’ methodology.

Last month, PRS Legislative Research provided a historical comparison of the number of bills passed to ordinances declared during each Lok Sabha since 1952.

In Chile, delegates from 27 countries gathered in Santiago on April 29-30 for the first Poplus Conference, organized by mySociety and Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente. Participants shared goals for the future of the Poplus network, a nascent project with the goal to create and share open source code that helps civic organizations around the world.

In the European Union, voting for European Parliamentary elections will take place May 22-25. Election results will be available in open data format, allowing interested users to retrieve raw data, use filters to present the information in custom ways, and publish it on their own online platforms.

In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Kohovolit.eu launched an election calculator for the European Parliament that allows users to browse voting data of European MPs from 2009 to 2014. The calculator allows users to curate the data by selecting issues important to them and reviewing how closely the voting records of different EMPs match their views.

Click here to read more.

Updated 1/17/14: Parliament Watch is currently requesting funds to continue operations. To contribute, click here. 

Interview with Parliament Watch founder Gregor Hackmack:

Organization: Parliament Watch
Project: Parliamentary monitoring in Germany and around the world
Country: Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, Ireland, Tunisia, France
Government Level: National

Overview: Launched in 2007, ParliamentWatch website seeks to introduce a new element of accountability and awareness of the activities of parliament to German political culture. ParliamentWatch compiles and organizes legislative information and allows citizens to publically question their elected officials. The platform works with legislatures across Germany. It is being implemented in 5 other countries by partnering organizations as well.

Click here to read more.

Since its publishing in September 2012, the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, supported by nearly 120 parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) around the globe, aims to promote a new commitment towards openness in parliaments.

During a course on  “Digital Sustainability” at ETH Zurich with Marcus Dapp of the Open Knowledge Foundation, I examined the lower chambers of national parliaments in Germany, Austria and Switzerland: the Bundestag, the Nationalrat Osterreich and the Nationalrat Schweiz. The goal of the research was to compare the postulations of OpeningParliament.org with the latest status in the parliaments.

In these countries the standard of living is high and the technological development advanced. Hence the aspects of access to information and its technical realization are of high interest.

Click here to read more.

Due to my work in Mexico (which you should see another update on very soon), this post has been long delayed. And because of that, it’s also just plain long – you might need a few sittings to get through this one. Thanks to NDI project assistant Greg Brown for his help putting this together:

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

During an OpeningParliament Google Hangout, Markus Schmidt discussed his study of the performance of the German, Swiss and Austrian parliaments against the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. During the session, German PMOs began planning to conduct joint advocacy using the study and the Declaration to create a workplan that Bundestag staffers can follow to open parliamentary data.

In Mexico last week, it was announced that the government had signed a nearly $10 million contract to create an app to release legislative information. In response, Codeando México launched #App115, a contest to build the app for free through open source tools, offering a prize of just $1,000. After the outcry, the Mexican Congress canceled the expensive contract and organizations who lined up to support #App115, like Fundar, have been invited to present its results to the Congress’ Science and Technology Commission at the beginning of next month.

In the U.S., the Sunlight Foundation published its Open Legislative Data Report Card, an analysis of the openness of data in all 50 U.S. states. The report card analyzes states based on the completeness, timeliness, and permanence of government data along with ease of access and machine readability. Sunlight, a core partner in OpeningParliament.org, has recently expanded its focus to rededicate itself to international efforts.

Click here to read more.