As in previous years, Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW) showcased the fantastic work being done around the world to realize the principles of open parliament. Organized by members of the Open Government Partnership's Legislative Openness Working Group, GLOW featured more than 20 events and activities organized by parliaments and civil society organizations in over 15 countries around the world. This year included a diverse range of activities, such as public events and private meetings, campaigns and advocacy, and hackathons and the development of new digital tools. The diversity of approaches and actors that made Global Legislative Openness Week a success also demonstrates that the global movement for open, responsive legislatures is broad, deep, and growing.

Click here to read more.

During Global Legislative Openness Week, the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies has released a collection of new digital tools designed to open the work of the Chamber. Details are provided below.

e-Democracia: Developed by the Chamber of Deputies’ HackerLab, the new version of the platform for social participation in the legislative process will not be just another set of interactive tools, but it will be a collection of the best solutions for participation that have been developed as free software. Initially, two tools are going to be available: Wikilegis, in which citizens collaboratively draft bills in wiki style, making suggestions and commenting; and Discourse, more modern and functional discussion forum of issues under consideration in the Chamber of Deputies. In a second stage, new inquiries and e-petition tools are being considered. Another innovation to make the user’s life easier is the functionality of suggesting debates and projects related to legislative issues according to preferences set by the user, in a similar way that platforms present movies and series according to the user’s profile. 

The new e-Democracia is going through usability tests with university students and public schools students. After its release, the aim is to expand the tests so as to also listen to citizens in general about their experience using the new platform. The tests will also focus on their interaction with the legislative process.

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Lo siguiente fue escrito por Natalia Albañil, Coordinadora del Programa de Transparencia Legislativa Regional, NDI Colombia. 

En las últimas semanas se llevaron a cabo dos importantes eventos regionales en materia de Parlamento Abierto. El 25 y 26 de mayo en Asunción – Paraguay se realizó el primer encuentro anual de la Red de Parlamento Abierto de ParlAmericas, y el 31 de mayo, 1 y 2 de junio en Montevideo – Uruguay, el Encuentro Regional de la Alianza para el Gobierno Abierto (Open Government Partnership, OGP).

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This post was written by Cristiano Ferri, Director of the HackerLab in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies.

We’re pleased to announce the first Global Legislative Hackathon 2016, jointly organized by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, National Democratic Institute, Brazilian Chamber of Deputies’ HackerLab and Chilean Chamber of Deputies. The event is part of the World e-Parliament Conference 2016 (WePC).

Everyone from around the world is invited to work on legislative issues and to help ideate, code and co create digital solutions that contribute to better understand legislative work and to engage citizens in lawmaking.

The Hackathon will be held in Valparaiso, Chile from 28 June 2016 (Tuesday) to 30 June 2016 (Thursday). You are not required to be physically present. Registration for the Hackathon is opened from 25 May to 26 June 2016.

For more information and registration, please visit: 

www.wepc2016.org/en/hackathon-wepc2016 (English)

www.wepc2016.org/es/hackaton-wepc2016 (Spanish).

This post was written by Fabiano Angélico. 

In Brazil, the investigation known as Operation Car Wash, which seems to reveal endless surprises and new facts, has shaken the Brazilian political landscape, hitting large corporations (public and private) and affecting the legitimacy and public confidence in politicians, political parties, and institutions.

Moreover, it unveiled deficiencies and gaps in the political system and revealed that corruption and inefficiency exist throughout the system. Limited trust in democracy provides space for for extremism, and it is high time we seriously thought about building solutions. The very low level of confidence in institutions suggests that there is little room for incremental or gradual solutions. Therefore, it is advisable to seek disruptive solutions that can help put a swift end to Brazil’s political crisis.

Click here to read more.

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.

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.