News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Chile, Chile Transparente celebrated the passing of new legislation to create a public register of lobbyists and lobbying. Previously, Chile Transparente marked the new year with articles looking at the accomplishments of the transparency movement worldwide, and commented on the specific challenges facing Chile that lay ahead.

Poplus, the network founded by mySociety and Ciudadano Inteligente, launched a new platform called SayIt. SayIt makes it easier to launch websites to track and publish politicians’ speeches, interviews, and the proceedings of trials.

In Azerbaijan, the International Human Rights Protection Association condemned the arrest of Anar Mammadli, Chairman of the Election Monitoring and Democracy Studies Center (EMDS), on charges of tax evasion and abuse of office as baseless, illegal, and suspect, given EMDS’ reports of abuse during the October Presidential Election. You can find the final report of OSCE’s election observation mission on Azerbaijan’s Presidential Election on the EMDS website. A timeline is available here.

In the United States, the Sunlight Foundation announced a new initiative to increase political finance transparency, including a free webinar series. Sunlight also launched a new version of the Congress app, incorporating legislative district maps with Mapbox technology. The Economist published a neat data visualization on polarization in American politics, drawing on Govtrack.us data.

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News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Mexico, Visión Legislativa took on the task of reviewing fast track legislation and the legislative process as established by la Ley Orgánica del Congreso. The article gives a brief overview of some of the best pieces of legislation between the years 1917 and 2000. Visión Legislativa also recently published a history of legislative elections and political parties.

SayIt, a new component of the Poplus network, launched this week. The goal of Poplus, which mySociety and Ciudadano Inteligente founded, is to collaboratively build pieces of technology that make it quicker and cheaper for people around the world to build websites and apps designed to empower citizens.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Centre for Civil Initiatives reports that parliamentarians and citizens participated in 27 public meetings in 2013, providing a forum for parliamentarians and citizens to talk about the current situation on a given topic.

In Georgia, Transparency International Georgia issued a statement urging the Georgian Parliament not to vote for the postponement of a new rule related to witness interrogation during investigations, a process seen as unconstitutional.

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Organization: Samara
Project: The Member of Parliament Website Project
Country: Canada
Government Level: National

Overview:  

Samara’s Member of Parliament Website Project analyzed the websites of 300 members of the Canadian Parliament (MPs) to better understand how MPs use their websites and the extent to which MPs take advantage of the opportunity the Internet provides to allow them to better connect with their constituents. Samara created a list of 14 criteria that were analysed by volunteers for each website. Samara summarized the results in an infographic that can be shared across social media platforms. They also provide a list of the Top MPs websites and a checklist of tips for elected officials’ websites.

Overall, the analysis found that MPs are great at offering their constituents the basic information about themselves, but they perform poorly at offering ways for Canadians to engage with politics or have input on decisions and policy.

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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.

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News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Spain, Qué hacen los diputados released an analysis of the parliamentary website, using the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness as a base point. Qué hacen los diputados continued their series on forms of citizen participation in politics by looking at basic institutional norms of Spain’s Autonomous Communities. Fundación Ciudadana Civio reported that the new Quién Manda? platform already has 2,500 profiles and 3,200 verified relationships. Civio also published guidelines for republishing their content and projects, stating, “All of our articles are re-publishable. We do not compete with media. We want you to use our information.”

In Romania, the Institute for Public Policy called for public debate on the future of an MPs Code of Conduct, citing concerns that the current draft of the code does not take into account the perspective of civil society. The Ratiu Center for Democracy highlighted Roma activist Dr. Angela Koczi as the recipient of the Ion Ratiu Democracy Award by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

In Argentina, El Estadista published an article by the director of CIPPEC’s Local Development Program on how e-governance can help improve citizen participation. Directorio Legislativo conducted a series of interviews via Twitter with candidates from different provinces and parties in the lead up to legislative elections. The Executive Director of Directorio Legislativo wrote a guest post for the Sunlight Foundation blog, discussing the decade of struggle it took for Argentina’s Congress to publish the declarations of assets and conflicts of interests of its members.

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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.

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News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Ukraine, Chesno has had a busy month. In early September, Speaker of the Parliament Rybak pledged more transparency and openness in parliamentary proceedings during a civil society meeting led by Chesno. Then, Chesno called on the parliament to pass access to information legislation, highlighted the failure of one-third of MPs to file parliamentary inquiries, reported on the barring of journalists from committee meetings, and examined so-called “independent” MPs. Chesno also released a new series of studies on MPs who vote outside of party lines. This high level of activity came even as one of their employees was assaulted.

Also in Ukraine, Transparency International Ukraine called on the parliament to pass bill 0947, which would increase access to information, as well as a potential anti-corruption bill.

In Switzerland, Politnetz.ch developed a new webpage to publicize data around parliamentary voting, in addition to a new survey for the German national elections in partnership with the national broadcasting network. Politnetz.ch, along with local partners, has also expanded its parliamentary monitoring to cantonal parliaments, including St. Gallen and Basel-Stadt. The organization recently won a Grimme Online Award and called for e-voting. OpenData.ch covered efforts by the Swiss government to increase the availability of government data.

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