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.