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.

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself having the same conversation with parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) from countries like Slovakia, Mexico and South Korea: What are examples of civic websites that have been most successful at garnering huge traffic around legislative information—and how did they do it? The question actually addresses a more fundamental idea than just how to gain visitors to a PMO website. It goes back to how we get citizens to care about and engage in the political process, taking advantage of new technologies.

I spoke with leaders from a few of the more highly-trafficked PMOs from around the world to try and find a better answer to these questions and I’ll be posting those conversations as a three-part article over the next three days. Two things remain clear: (1) citizens do care about political information, but (2) more experimentation—whether failed or successful—is still needed to help figure out how best to translate that into effective civic engagement.

Leveraging academic and media relationships in Colombia

In the weeks leading up to the March 9 parliamentary elections in Colombia, Congreso Visible was seeing more than 120,000 visits to their webpage per day, a huge number for a civic site—or any site. This is especially true considering the relative simplicity of the platform: a traditional parliamentary monitoring website focused on providing citizens with some of the most basic information about the makeup and activities of the Colombian Congress. The organization has not only been successful in providing that information, but in getting people to seek it out. 

Over the years, Congreso Visible’s key strategy has been to attempt to leverage partnerships with national and regional newspapers within Colombia and other traditional media outlets like radio stations. For example, the group’s alliance with El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogotá, allows the newspaper to include a widget developed by Congreso Visible on the webpage of every article that mentions a member of congress. Congreso Visible takes no profit from this arrangement, allowing the newspaper to use the widget to display information about representatives, including how many years they’ve been a member, how they’ve voted recently, or how many bills they’ve passed. If someone is interested in learning more, they can click the widget in order to visit Congreso Visible’s website.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Portugal, a petition that began to circulate in March calls for more comprehensive information access on the voting records of Members of Parliament on the parliament’s website. While the website currently holds a record of activity for each member, determining how an individual votes for a particular measure can be difficult. The initiative is similar to another petition, that would create an electronic registry on the votes of each representative in the National Assembly. Transparencia Hackday, a Declaration endorser, has supported these measures.

In the United Kingdom, mySociety interviewed Flavio Zeni about the Akoma Ntoso metadata format for the recently launched SayIt platform (for more on Akoma Ntoso implementation around the world, see Robert Richards’ list here). mySociety reviewed the UK Parliament’s online services last month (report available here), while Computing.com recently provided a look at technology in the British Parliament, including widening access to parlaimentary information (H/T Robert Richards).

In Hungary, the Public Policy Institute (PPI) released its report on parliamentary activities in 2013, drawing attention to several important issues, including the quality of projects initiated by parliamentarians, chronic absenteeism, abuse of tacit adoption procedures, failure to exercise legislative power to rein in the executive branch, and encouragement of political migration by some parties.

In Nigeria, CISLAC outlined various advocacy positions and strategies for engagement during the recently convened National Conference. CISLAC emphasized that beyond discussing contentious historical issues at the conference, the government needed to set the agenda “inclusive, participatory democratic governance beyond 2015.”

In the United States, the Sunlight Foundation analyzed the White House Office of Management and Budget’s opposition to portions of the DATA ACT and changes to the Senate version of the bill which weaken the bills data standardization provisions. It also has continued a webinar series on enhancing transparency in political finance, with past webinars viewable here. Elsewhere, GCN profiled the GovLab and its new public interest lab network.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Venezuela, Transparencia Venezuela outlined various civil rights in response to the worsening human rights situation in Venezuela. Earlier in February, the group joined with Forum for Life and other Venezuelan organizations to issue a statement condemning the increasing violence, arbitrary detention, and spread of misinformation by the government.

The European Parliament recently called on the government of Venezuela to disarm pro-government militant groups targeting ongoing protests with impunity. In a joint resolution, the Parliament called for the dispatch of a European-led monitoring group to Venezuela and for the Maduro government to withdraw arrest warrants issued for opposition leaders.

In the Ukraine, CHESNO suggested five criteria for the composition of a new cabinet of ministers and other management authorities in Ukraine. The President of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly (who has previously blogged on OpeningParliament) stated that the Assembly should play a strong role in direct talks between Ukraine and Russia.

Meanwhile, OPORA reported that documents taken from the Party of Regions headquarters in Chernivtsi may reveal violations of the 2012 electoral law, including the improper use of administrative resources by the Party, indirect vote-buying, using indirect Party representatives to obtain a majority in the election commissions, and the improper handling and storage of personal data lists.

In Afghanistan, the Free and Fair Election Forum (FEFA) released its first election observation report, which analyzes the security and electoral environment and reports violations observed so far in the run up to the April 5 presidential election.

In Mexico, Senator Laura Rojas spoke during Transparency Week in Mexico in support of further efforts to open government, which she said would address public concern with closed door negotiations on appointments, lack of budget transparency, confusion about allocation of resources for parliamentary travel, and many other issues. During Transparency Week activities, Senate President Raul Cervantes announced the creation of a joint commission to recommend actions to increase the transparency of Mexico’s government.

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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.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Germany, there was much activity in advance of the September 22 national elections. TechPresident highlighted the efforts of Tilo Jung’s series of Youtube videos to connect the younger electorate with candidates. Parliament Watch showcased a different public information series on Youtube. The PMO recently launched a new voter information tool called Candidate Watch and examined candidates who are committed to more transparency (and questioned those who are not). A new E-Government Act went into effect earlier this month and the CDU party recently released a “Merkel-App.”

In Chile, Matt Compton, deputy director of online content for the Digital Strategy Office of the White House, visited Chile Transparente to talk about the We The People platform and other citizen engagement efforts. Chile Transparente also held a seminar on transparency in political parties, featuring perspectives from Mexico and Germany. The Chilean parliament recently launched a new video transmission tool to increase parliamentary transparency.

In the United Kingdom, mySociety revealed a new name for the codebase associated with PMO platforms TheyWorkForYou, Mzalendo, and others: Pombola, a combination of “PMO” and “Tombola.” The code is generating interest around the world and will be used in the upcoming Zimbabwean PMO platform Kuvakazim. mySociety’s FOI website recently reached the milestone of 50,000 registered users and posted a case study on Fatequalcosa.it, a platform to improve government service delivery in Italy.  

Click here to read more.