News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Argentina, a number of CSOs, including Directorio Legislativo, Poder Ciudadano, and Asociación Civil por la Igualdad y la Justicia (ACIJ) have partnered with the newspaper La Nacion to launch an interactive website revealing the financial statements of MPs, public officials, and judges. This video (Spanish) explains more about the project, which was 10 years in the making.

In Germany, the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany organized a youth civic hacking event. OKFN Germany’s August activities report is available here. Meanwhile, Parliament Watch examined extra income received by German politicians.

In the United States, the Sunlight Foundation announced procurement open data guidelines to help shape how governments release data on their procurement process. Elsewhere in the U.S., GovTrack founder Josh Tauberer was featured in a profile, the city of San Francisco will test online participatory budgeting, Code For America discussed why civic hacking matters, Fast Company profiled PopVox, and the makers of Politify (now called Outline) finalized a deal to create a “public policy dashboard” for the state of Massachusetts. Outline was also a winner of a Knight Award (the most recent of which went to community-focused open government projects).

In Georgia, Transparency International Georgia detailed key aspects of the new “personal data protection inspector” position and pushed for a proactive publication of government information. JumpStart Georgia also issued a similar call, highlighting its work to make election and parliamentary data open and accessible.

Click here to read more.

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Spain, Fundación Ideas and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) hosted a number of organizations in a discussion on the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, which included participation by Miguel Angel Gonzalo, webmaster of the Spanish Chamber of Deputies, and Michal Skop of KohoVolit.eu . Participants discussed various aspects of the Declaration, in particular how the Spanish parliament meets or fails to meet its provisions, including on issues of access to information and using search engines and alert services. Qué Hacen Los Diputados posted an informative article about the Declaration in the Spanish context (for current affairs, see this blog post) and also an article on the Spanish legislative process more generally. Qué Hacen Los Diputados is currently fundraising to expand their website and services. Finally, La Fundación Ciudadana Civio called for political parties and the Spanish Congress to make their finances public.

In Latin America, the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency (LALT Network), alongside International IDEA Peru and others participated in a seminar on information technologies and citizen engagement with parliaments. Participants discussed turning technologies into civic education, the concept of “digital citizenship”, and efforts toward parliamentary transparency and integrity. The presentation by Manuel Arís on the mission of the LALT Network is available here. For more information on transparency efforts in the region by LALT and OpeningParliament.org, see this recent article by Ernesto Diaz Diego-Iturbe. The Nieman Journalism Lab recently covered open data and transparency efforts in the region.

Click here to read more.

This update was compiled by my colleague Dustin Palmer, who will be taking over the regular duties of putting this post together. 

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Bangladesh, Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) expressed optimism at the opposition party’s decision to join the upcoming budget session of parliament.

In Belgium, the software division of Gov2U was acquired by Scytl, a company focused on election modernization efforts. Also in Belgium, the Open Knowledge Foundation of Belgium took over stewardship of the OpenBelgium website.

In Egypt, the Egyptian Democracy Institute (EDI) released a report on the April 2013 activities of the Shura Council (or Upper House).

In India, a brief profile of the president of PRS Legislative Research was published, amid other news coverage of the country’s parliamentary stalemate.

In Kenya, the PMO Mzalendo published an article detailing the possibly illegal actions of the police during the recent “Occupy Parliament” protest.

In Malaysia, the Sinar Project posted an internship opening in Subang Jaya.

Click here to read more.

Thanks to NDI project assistant Greg Brown for his help in compiling these updates. Please send us your own news – it makes these updates much easier to compile.

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Mexico, apart from the Senate’s endorsement of the Declaration, a group of activists and civil society representatives presented the five winners of the #App115 contest. The initiative convinced the Congress to cancel an unnecessarily expensive contract to build an app by mobilizing hackers to build the app for almost no cost at all, saving more than 110 million pesos. Read all about the story on TechCrunch.

This week in Poland, the PMO ePanstwo Foundation re-launched their comprehensive parliamentary monitoring website, Sejmometr. Back in February, an open source version of their platform called OchParliament was made available on GitHub.

In Italy, OpenPolis has launched a campaign to lobby members of parliament to make information about committee activity available to the public.

In Lebanon, a new coalition of civil society groups was launched, the National Civil Society Parliament Liaison Unit, with the aim of making parliament more transparent and responsive to citizens.

Click here to read more.

As usual, some housekeeping: 

• I hope some of you have had the chance to review the final Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. You can also view a regularly updated list of supporting organizations here: there are now 73 PMOs from 53 countries (plus the EU and Latin America, regionally) who have participated in the development of or indicated support for the declaration.
• We’re currently working on a cover design and would like to incorporate translations of the title from multiple languages – if you have a minute, please send us the translation of “Declaration on Parliamentary Openness” into your native language.
• Pedro Markun from Transparencia Hacker in Brazil sent out a survey for global PMOs on technology. This survey will aim to help the community to assess what kind of technological needs exist in PMOs around the world as well as where organizations may have strengths. The ultimate goal here will be to create a ‘tech support group’ to aid fledgling PMOs who need help building websites, website components, or just making technological choices. Please fill out that survey here. Once we have some good data, we’ll work with Pedro to publish the results to you.

Onto some news:

The Argentinian PMO Directorio Legislativo launched their seventh legislative directory entitled, Legislative Directory: Who are our legislators and how do they represent us?. The directory contains a survey of national legislators as well as information on 8 provincial legislatures. The launch of the directory took place at the Argentine Senate and was widely covered by the press. The event included a reform-minded Senator calling for the enactment of a law on access to information.

Click here to read more.

One quick reminder before I share some interesting articles: comment on the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness and the accompanying commentary here. The document would benefit greatly from your input, including your own country’s parliamentary practices and progress towards openness. Also, if you’d like your organization to be associated with the Declaration, both on the web and in print, shoot me an email with your logo. Now onto the news:

In Tunisia, organizations that are members of the group OpenGovTN, including the PMO Al Bawsala, are launching formal complaints against the National Constituent Assembly for failing provide parliamentary information like voting and attendance records and commission reports, as required by law. Read more about that in a blog post from OpenGovTN and an article from the Tunis Afrique Press (both in French).

In the United Kingdom, the group MySociety announced that they have received a $2.9 million grant from the Omidyar Foundation to fund efforts to internationalize their websites and help organizations around the world to promote transparency and accountability in government by building their own websites and apps. Check out Tom Steinberg’s announcement on the MySociety blog or this article in techPresident to read about it.

Click here to read more.

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.

Click here to read more.