News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In India, a recent news article covered PRS Legislative Research’s organizational model. PRS Legislative Research recently published a report on the activities of the Lok Sabha, joined the debate on pending corruption bills, and explored parliamentary and constitutional issues of new statutory entitlement legislation. Elsewhere in India, the government launched an Accountability Initiative to provide resources for accountable governance and procurement. TechPresident covered CGNet Swara, a project aiming to empower citizens to address their problems using voice messaging. The Times of India detailed the lack of transparency in political donations. 

In Spain, OpenKratio became the 130th organization to endorse the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. OpenKratio supports a number of open government initiatives, including the Hummingbird Project, which aims to bridge the programmer/web journalist communities with the Spanish Congress to facilitate data access. Recently, OpenKratio announced a collaboration with the Andalucia Open Left political party and reported on a study on big data and political participation. A new app where users can express their opinion on current legislation is now available. Elsewhere, Global Integrity highlighted a “low-tech” approach to improving transparency in rural areas of Spain by Graba tu Pleno.

In Mexico, legislators in the Chamber of Deputies sought to change the content of transparency reforms in a way that civil society organizations said would be a major step back for government openness. Amid this vast criticism, legislators rolled back these changes at the last minute before passing the reforms through the Chamber late in the evening, September 22. Further commentary is available from Fundar here.

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In the premises of the only city that has been the capital of two great empires, parliamentarians from across Europe, Asia and North America gathered last month to continue the ongoing debate on human rights and security.

What we decide as parliamentarians or government officials is never easy, for we as elected officials represent diverse interests, but how we should deliberate on these public policy questions is always easy: openly and transparently.

That is why the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly has become the first international institution to endorse the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness.

Photo credit: OSCE

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Lithuanian Parliament has just taken a step towards fulfilling Declaration on Parliamentary Openness provision 2, Advancing a Culture of Openness through Legislation. A recently passed resolution put the Government under an obligation to make opening government data a strategic governance priority in the upcoming years. While this indeed is a good move, the Parliament missed an opportunity to lead by example and open up its own data and so benchmark openness standards to other institutions at first place.

As representative bodies of government, parliaments should pay particular attention to transparency of its work and accountability of its members. Besides publishing parliamentary data online, it is also important to create venues for others to re-use data and educate citizens on parliamentary functions. In a freshly published topic report for EPSI Platform, I’ve  outlined the main steps that Parliaments could potentially undertake when considering open data strategies.

An international effort has been made to support parliaments in their way to opening more parliamentary information and creating more effective open data policies. From the work done up to now, it is becoming clear that when considering open data strategies, parliaments should at least touch upon aspects, such as: 1) creating an effective and efficient document management system; 2) implementing open standards and open license; 3) implementing open data policy.

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On April 17, the Senate opened the door for the Congress of Mexico to move towards transparency. We had never before seen a commitment to make such substantial changes in the legislative process.

For nearly a month, the Mexican Congress has been said to be working at full speed toward new reforms, but with very few specifics. It is safe to say that things have been moving very fast, but with little transparency. However, today there are signs that this may change and we can bring some light to the legislative process.

With just a few days left before the end of the second session in Congress and with a loaded legislative agenda left to address, this past April 17 we may have witnessed and participated in an event that may lead to very positive change in legislative work. The Senate’s Committee on the Assurance of Access and Transparency of Information (COGATI) – with the presence of Sen. Arely Gómez González, Sen. Salvador Vega Casilla and Sen. Juan Gerardo Flores Ramírez – officially endorsed the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. But what does this mean?

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In the first volume of this series, we saw how open data and sharing enabled one individual to bring to life political scientists’ complex information about legislative voting records.

Working with the same method of voting pattern analysis that Randall Munroe used in his datavisualization of partisanship and ideology in the U.S. Congress, Kohovolit has developed their own ways of helping citizens understand voting patterns – only for an entirely different set (really, sets) of legislators.

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The new PMO-oriented blog Re:Imagining Democracy, hosted by the Latvian Centre for Public Policy PROVIDUS, has posted an interview about the OpeningParliament network and the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness (which is now available in 14 languages). Melissa Ortiz Masso of Fundar and I participated in the discussion, which was led by Iveta Kazoka. It can be found here.

A highlight for me is when Melissa talks about how advocacy with the Declaration has altered the quality of discussion that she had been having with the Mexican Congress. In Melissa’s words:

[The Declaration] has been a great platform for me and my Congress! Now I can say to the Congress that it is not just me, but rather there is an international community that is pushing for new standards – and not just in countries like Mexico, but in countries like Germany and Finland.

When you put it like that – the members of parliament soften. It’s surprising the extent to which the members of parliament have changed their attitudes both towards us and the issue itself!

We’re working on improving the standards in Mexico right now – we’re following the declaration paragraph by paragraph to understand what needs to be changed. Probably in April we will present the results and the Action Plan on the necessary improvements to senators. And there are other good examples as well – for example, in Argentina.

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Two weeks ago, I began a three-week-long stint in Mexico City working with Fundar: Centro de Análisis e Investigación, assisting the civil society organization’s transparency and accountability team in advancing the openness of the Mexican Congress. The trip is part of a Legislative Fellows program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and Partners of the Americas.

Here I’ll share some thoughts on the approach taken by Fundar, as well as by OpeningParliament.org’s other two supporting organizations from Mexico, Impacto Legislativo and Visión Legislativa. While my work here is not finished yet, in just a short period I’ve been able to experience some of the great impacts of these parliamentary monitoring organizations to create possibilities for positive change and reform.

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