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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We’ve slowed down a little bit for the holidays, but expect us to ramp up activity in the new year. Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and a wonderful new year to all! Here’s 2012’s last update:

News in parliamentary monitoring:

In the United States, Popvox published its ‘Weekly Roundup’ of bills considered in Congress on its blog. This is a regularly published resource that Popvox offers to its readers, highlighting the topics and legislation debated in Congress in a given week. In the wake of the devastating school shooting in the U.S., Popvox also published an issue-focused blog on bills that address mental health care. Check out the Popvox blog for a vast amount of resources and good examples of how an organization uses parliamentary data.

In Ukraine, PMO community member Chesno has begun monitoring the newly elected parliament. On it’s first working day, Chesno pointed out two cases of members of parliament allowing another member to vote in their place, detailed in Chesno’s blog and covered by the news media. Chesno also plans to focus on MP attendance of committee and plenary sessions.

A member of parliament in Mexico published an opinion piece in national media calling on the Mexican Congress to adopt a digital strategy, allowing it to better engage citizens using ICTs. The article calls on parliament to adopt a policy of openness and transparency, and cites the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency’s index and the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness as important tools to achieve that end. 

Mzalendo, a PMO in Kenya, published a blog post citing very low attendance rates in the Kenyan parliament as the country approaches major elections next Spring. Although parliament will be dissolved in advance of the elections, there is still important business for MPs to consider.

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This post originally appeared on Regards Citoyens’ blog.

Following some remarks from Richard Swetenham from the European Commission, we made a few changes relative to the trialogue process and the coming steps: the trialogue will start its meetings on 17th December and it is therefore already very useful to call on our governments to support Open Formats!

When we work on building all these amazing democratic transparency collaborative tools all over the world, all of us, OpenData users and producers, struggle with these incredibly frustrating closed or unexploitable formats under which public data is unfortunately so often released: XLS, PDF, DOC, JPG, completely misformatted tables, and so on.

The EU PSI directive revision is a chance to push for a clear Open Formats definition!

As part of Neelie Kroes’s Digital Agenda, the European Commission recently proposed a revision of the Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive in order to grant european public OpenData a new paradigm enabling mandatory re-use and an enlarged scope of public data to be liberated.

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Over the past several months, Transparency International has been running a blog series on codes of conduct for public officials. It is a great resource for organizations that are working on this issue with respect to parliaments or other groups of government officials, and I’m sure your comments on the series or specific articles would be appreciated. Topics addressed in the series include the purpose of codes of conduct, their main features, the issues they cover, their legal basis,  benefits and challenges, etc. It draws on examples from around the world, including valuable case studies of the European Parliament’s love/hate relationship with its code of conduct and TI Georgia’s experience developing a code of conduct that was adopted, but not implemented, by the Parliament of Georgia. 

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Thanks to María Baron for filling the gap last week with some great news updates from Latin America. If you missed it, you can view her post here. Also, if you want to view the discussion that took place among the PMO community at the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki at the end of last month, a streaming version of the 90-minute session is now available online.

Onto some news:

In the U.S., a collaboration of eight nonprofit organizations released a report on what they call the “advocacy gap” – the disconnect between how activists mobilize to engage Congress and how Congressional staff say they should mobilize to be most effective. This is a survey of nearly 4,000 activists and top legislative staffers in Congress, with some very interesting conclusions. Also stateside, the Participatory Politics Foundation unveiled a new initiative to bring OpenGovernment.org down to the local level. Read more about it on the OpenCongress blog.

In Ireland, the parliament (Oireachtas) suspended their XML feed, effectively killing, at least temporarily, the PMO KildareStreet. Check out this blog post about this seemingly huge step backwards for the Irish parliament. After some backlash, it looks like KildareStreet and the Orieachtas are working out a solution, according to the most recent update on KildareStreet.com. Stay tuned for more news on this…

I’m not sure if this has already been sent out to the group in the many articles we’ve seen in the past few weeks on the Declaration, but In Mexico, an article was published which includes a look at the regional distribution of the signatories of the Declaration.

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Just a few interesting news items to share that I’ve come across in the past week. If there have been any happenings in your own countries or if you want to share any recent work, please feel free to reply. Thanks to Maria for sharing some news from Latin America, and to Eric for an update on the great new Scout tool from the Sunlight Foundation.

In Hong Kong, SynergyNet released their report on the Governance Performance of the HKSAR Government 2012, a press release and the report are available here.

In Hungary, the government has expressed an intention to join the Open Government Partnership (OGP) after a long campaign by numerous NGOs. The PMO K-Monitor has released a set of recommendations for the government to become more open, detailed in this post on their blog.

India and the US launched a bilateral effort to utilize a new Open Government Platform. This open source software includes a data management system, web site, and social networking community support. More information is available on the project’s website at http://www.opengovplatform.org/.

Zambia: Constitution coalition asks government to publicise budget (Post Zambia)

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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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