It has been a busy few months for the global open parliament community! Below, we’ve compiled a collection of updates. With so much great work, we’re certain that we’ve missed some fantastic projects, initiatives, and events. As always, if you would like to see your work included in this News Brief, feel free to reach out to the site administrators on the contact page.

In case you missed it, Global Legislative Openness Week was a success around the world. More information can be found at OpenParlWeek.org, but highlights include:

• The Parliament of Georgia, the Legislative Openness Working Group, and a collection of local and international organizations organized a global legislative openness conference, entitled Committing to Openness: Parliamentary Action Plans, Standards, and Tools. The conference featured over 100 legislators, legislative staff, and civil society representatives from more than 30 countries who shared experiences advancing legislative openness and explored ways in which OGP can be most effectively leveraged to advance public access to legislative information and processes.
• Around the world, mySociety led a crowdsourcing campaign to collect structured, reusable data on politicians in 201 countries. This information is now public and available on their website.
• The Brazilian Chamber of Deputies launched a collection of new tech platforms to foster citizen engagement in the legislative process. To celebrate GLOW, the Chamber launched these new open source services for use outside Brazil.
• In Taiwan, Citizen Congress Watch (TWN) organized the 2015 International Conference on Congressional Reform and Watch, introduced for the first time in Taipei. Topics of discussion included best practices and experience sharing on congressional oversight and promoting transparency and reform in Congress. More information about the conference can be seen here.
• Open Knowledge Danmark, Foreningen Gennemsigt, and the Centre for Voting and Parties hosted an event on open parliamentary data in Denmark. The event, which was live streamed using Periscope, featured discussion of how best to make use of parliamentary data, how to turn it into usable information, and how to make it accessible to a broader audience. 

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Mexico, from Oct 27-29, the Open Government Partnership’s Global Summit convened over 1500 open government advocates from civil society, government, and parliament. Speakers and participants shared experiences from their respective countries and provided real examples of how openness can improve public services, drive economic growth, reduce poverty and make governments more accountable to the people they serve. For the first time, the OGP Summit featured a “track” on legislative openness, which included a number of interesting sessions and a dedicated side meeting for MPs. A blog post sharing more information on the Summit will be posted shortly.

In Argentina, the government made strides forward in opening access to public information when the Chamber of Appeals ruled in favor of Poder Ciudadano, Fundación Directorio Legislativo, and other groups in their request to access administrative decisions made by the Chamber of Deputies. This ruling requires the Chamber to make the results of administrative decisions public by publishing them on its website.

In Kenya, Mzalendo conducted a comprehensive assessment of the contributions that women MPs made to the work of Kenya’s 11th parliament. In addition to a formal report, Mzalendo also published an infographic, which includes a word cloud on issues women MPs most commonly discussed in parliament.

Click here to read more.

Photo credit: Making All Voices Count

On September 15, Making All Voices Count (MAVC), a global initiative that aims to create opportunities for new ideas and technologies that strengthen citizen engagement and government responsiveness, is launching its second Global Innovation Competition (GIC). In this year’s competition, Making All Voices Count is seeking ideas relating to four themes, including legislative openness. 

£300,000 in grants are available to winners who propose projects in a limited set of countries: Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Indonesia, the Philippines, Liberia, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Mozambique, Uganda and Nigeria.

This announcement comes on the heels of the Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW), being organized by the Legislative Openness Working Group of the Open Government Partnership, that will see events and conversations relating to legislative openness happening around the world. The GIC offers an important platform to help translate many of these discussions into new tools and innovations to help parliaments better represent citizens, and to help citizens better engage and communicate with their elected representatives.

You can read more about the competition at MAVC’s website.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In India, PRS Legislative Research released two very interesting documents: a concept note entitled “Rethinking the Indian Parliament” and a series of data visualizations of parliamentary activity. These accompanied PRS’s annual conference on effective legislatures, the lectures of which are available here. The visualizations were constructed from their firsthand data gathering, available here. The latest PRS report on parliamentary performance is available here. The Indian parliament passed a bill to form a new anti-corruption agency.

In Nigeria, CISLAC published a guide to understanding the parliamentary ethics and conduct regime, defining the problems that exist, and identifying the role of MPs. CISLAC also provided an overview of the two-day Seminar on “African State Legislatures: Subnational Politics and National Power” organized by Landmark University Omu-Aran in collaboration with National Endowment for Democracy and University of America in Omu-Aran, Kwara.

In Tunisia, Al Bawsala, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Carter Center issued a joint statement on urging the National Constituent Assembly to ensure the new constitution of Tunisia is brought into conformity with international human rights standards and obligations of the country under international law.

In Zimbabwe, a new parliamentary monitoring platform was launched: KuvakaZim. The founders state, “The KuvakaZim project was born from a general concern regarding the accountability and activities of Zimbabwean members of Parliament and their duties in regard of their representative roles.” mySociety also wrote a post about this new platform, as KuvakaZim is utilizing their Pombola platform.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Europe, a recent ruling granted further access to the legislative process of the Council of the European Union. The decision is available in all EU languages here. The case was brought by Access Info Europe.

In Poland, Sejmometr published an analysis of the Polish Parliament’s progress towards openness, using the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness as a basis for analysis. 

In India, PRS Legislative Research published an article on the successes and failures of youth Members of Parliament. The Sunlight Foundation discusses the eighth anniversary of the Right to Information Act and implications for political finance transparency.

In Colombia, Transparencia por Colombia offered tips for understanding accountability efforts in the country, while Congreso Visible assessed efforts to bring equality for women to the legislature in the wake of a 2011 commission to improve gender equality.

In South Africa, the Right2Know campaign urged the South African parliament to redraft a bill on transparency to ensure accountable democracy, and offered a number of recommendations. The bill was recently returned to Parliament by the President amid a number of concerns.

Click here to read more.

This update was compiled by my colleague Dustin Palmer, who will be taking over the regular duties of putting this post together. 

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Bangladesh, Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) expressed optimism at the opposition party’s decision to join the upcoming budget session of parliament.

In Belgium, the software division of Gov2U was acquired by Scytl, a company focused on election modernization efforts. Also in Belgium, the Open Knowledge Foundation of Belgium took over stewardship of the OpenBelgium website.

In Egypt, the Egyptian Democracy Institute (EDI) released a report on the April 2013 activities of the Shura Council (or Upper House).

In India, a brief profile of the president of PRS Legislative Research was published, amid other news coverage of the country’s parliamentary stalemate.

In Kenya, the PMO Mzalendo published an article detailing the possibly illegal actions of the police during the recent “Occupy Parliament” protest.

In Malaysia, the Sinar Project posted an internship opening in Subang Jaya.

Click here to read more.

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.

Click here to read more.

Now that the OpeningParliament community has launched the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, the focus of activity is shifting to using it as a tool for advocacy at the country level. More specifically, organizations are seeking to answer the question: how can the Declaration can be used not only to support “open parliaments” for the sake of openness, but also to support the higher level goal of more responsive, accountable and democratic parliaments?

Obviously, the Declaration is only one of many advocacy tools, but it can hopefully serve as a useful roadmap for the world’s parliaments on what a truly open, democratic parliament should look like. It can also help stimulate a global conversation around parliamentary openness between the OpeningParliament community and parliaments. Perhaps most importantly, as John Wonderlich from the Sunlight Foundation put it, the Declaration can help to “validate the work” of parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) worldwide – so that when a PMO seeks to engage the Speaker of Parliament in a particular country, they are doing so not just as an individual NGO or as a group of individual activists, but also a part of a reputable international movement.

Click here to read more.