News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Spain, the PMO Civio launched a new project called Quién Manda, or “Who Rules?”  The project aims to monitor the interactions of Spanish politicians and officials with corporate leaders by an innovative photo-tagging scheme. Thus far, they’ve identified over 2500 relationships. Recently, a Sunlight Foundation team member worked with Civio in the lead up to the launch. There is still an active crowd-funding campaign for the initiative on Goteo. 

Elsewhere in Spain, a Spanish lawmaker held an attempt at direct democracy related to a transparency bill, a vital effort given Spain’s recent ranking of 75 out of 96 countries on access to information issues. Last month, the Masters of Media project commented on the Spanish status quo and Que Hacen Los Diputados discussed what the Congress needs to provide to ensure transparency.

In Pakistan, PILDAT released a number of reports, including on: the first meeting of a senate parliamentary friendship group on Afghanistan; the first 100 days of governance at the national and provincial levels; and two reports on the Pakistan-Afghanistan Parliamentary dialogues.

In Venezuela, Transparencia Venezuela released a report on the nation’s budget for the first half of 2013, and condemned corruption in the country and noted the role of civil society in combatting it. Meanwhile Entorno Parlamentario discussed key upcoming bills and opposition to an anti-corruption law.

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Organization: mySociety
Project: Alaveteli, a freedom of information request platform
Country: Uruguay, Brazil, Croatia, Spain, UK, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Hungary, New Zealand, Australia
Government Level: All levels, inclusive of private enterprises, universities, and other public information holders

Overview: Alaveteli is a platform designed to facilitate the submission of freedom of information requests to the relevant authority to improve access to information for all citizens.

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News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Croatia, a new freedom of information law has been adopted. The law outlines the types of information that must be made public and calls for proactive publishing of this data by government agencies and bodies. GONG, a Croatian parliamentary monitoring organization, provided input and amendments to the law during its drafting, which were adopted.

In Botswana, the Botswana Speaks Parliamentary Initiative was recently launched with the help of Gov2u and other partners. The initiative, similar to the USpeak platform in Uganda, intends to improve governance and bring more voices into the policy-making discussion by connecting MPs directly with citizens through SMS messaging.

In Mexico, Fundar continues to work with MPs who are interested in redesigning the parliament’s website in order to make it more responsive to citizens. MPs cite the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency’s index and the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness as guides for this work. MPs held a Legislative Dialogues for a Digital Mexico meeting with activists, civil society organizations, and scholars calling for the creation of a new federal agency that would address a growing digital divide, work towards universal access to information, and drive Mexico’s broad digital agenda.

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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.

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I have some more news to share from the past week or so, including several success stories from PMO conference participants. Please reply with comments and share your own news as well. I’ve heard some great stories over the past couple of weeks from some of you in calls and emails about the work you’re doing around the world – it’s always inspiring to hear about. Here are a few examples:

In Tunisia, a coalition of open government organizations, OpenGovTN, which counts PMO Al Bawsala among its core members, has announced that, as of today, the Citizen Assembly should be publishing all committee meeting minutes and reports, and plenary roll call lists on the Assembly’s official website. You can read more about OpenGovTN’s efforts to unlock this information in this blog post from Nawaat.

In Serbia,a new website, otvoreniparlament.rs, was launched by the Open Parliament initiative, which includes the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA) among its leaders. The website will provide Serbians with the transcripts of all parliamentary sessions. You can read more about this in a press release from USAID.

In Kyrgyzstan, over the past month, the Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society has won two major court cases against the Parliament of Kyrgyzstan. The first, decided on May 11, will force Parliament to provide detailed information about the voting behavior of MPs. The second, decided last week on June 7, obliges Parliament to provide information on the business trips of MPs.

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