News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In India, national elections closed on May 16, with Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party anticipated to win more than the 272 seats required for a parliamentary majority. In advance of the election, Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS) developed report cards for members of the Lok Sabha. The report cards provide citizens with information gathered through the Right To Information Act and other government websites and assess MP performance on factors like attendance and efforts to introduce new development within their districts. See here for more information on SNS’ methodology.

Last month, PRS Legislative Research provided a historical comparison of the number of bills passed to ordinances declared during each Lok Sabha since 1952.

In Chile, delegates from 27 countries gathered in Santiago on April 29-30 for the first Poplus Conference, organized by mySociety and Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente. Participants shared goals for the future of the Poplus network, a nascent project with the goal to create and share open source code that helps civic organizations around the world.

In the European Union, voting for European Parliamentary elections will take place May 22-25. Election results will be available in open data format, allowing interested users to retrieve raw data, use filters to present the information in custom ways, and publish it on their own online platforms.

In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Kohovolit.eu launched an election calculator for the European Parliament that allows users to browse voting data of European MPs from 2009 to 2014. The calculator allows users to curate the data by selecting issues important to them and reviewing how closely the voting records of different EMPs match their views.

Click here to read more.

This is part two of a three-part series. You can view the first part with a brief introduction at this link. Check in tomorrow for part three.

Moving from information to advocacy in Germany

One of the most highly trafficked parliamentary monitoring sites in the world is Abgeordnetenwatch.de or Parliament Watch. As detailed in OpeningParliament.org’s case study, in addition to collecting and organizing basic parliamentary information, Parliament Watch creates a platform for citizens to pose questions to their members of parliament and for MPs to answer them. The site, which sees more than 350,000 unique visitors every month, has had more than 160,000 questions asked, with about 130,000 of them answered by MPs (as of the beginning of the year)—an 81% total response rate.

Parliament Watch’s founder Gregor Hackmack says that “the challenge of a PMO to be really effective is to drive traffic. The way you drive traffic is you need to stay in the public discourse. It’s not just enough to offer information, you need people to engage with that information and see its political significance.” But, he says, “Information is the first step, but it’s not enough to stay in the discourse over a long period of time.”

Parliament Watch includes pages for each member of Germany’s Bundestag.

Hackmack describes the evolution of Parliament Watch as having taken place in three stages. During the first, he says the site was an “engagement platform,” with an aim to give people direct access to information about their members of parliament and to start a dialogue between them. This stage focused on building the question and answer part of the site and was the beginning of partnerships with key media outlets like Der Spiegel.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Portugal, a petition that began to circulate in March calls for more comprehensive information access on the voting records of Members of Parliament on the parliament’s website. While the website currently holds a record of activity for each member, determining how an individual votes for a particular measure can be difficult. The initiative is similar to another petition, that would create an electronic registry on the votes of each representative in the National Assembly. Transparencia Hackday, a Declaration endorser, has supported these measures.

In the United Kingdom, mySociety interviewed Flavio Zeni about the Akoma Ntoso metadata format for the recently launched SayIt platform (for more on Akoma Ntoso implementation around the world, see Robert Richards’ list here). mySociety reviewed the UK Parliament’s online services last month (report available here), while Computing.com recently provided a look at technology in the British Parliament, including widening access to parlaimentary information (H/T Robert Richards).

In Hungary, the Public Policy Institute (PPI) released its report on parliamentary activities in 2013, drawing attention to several important issues, including the quality of projects initiated by parliamentarians, chronic absenteeism, abuse of tacit adoption procedures, failure to exercise legislative power to rein in the executive branch, and encouragement of political migration by some parties.

In Nigeria, CISLAC outlined various advocacy positions and strategies for engagement during the recently convened National Conference. CISLAC emphasized that beyond discussing contentious historical issues at the conference, the government needed to set the agenda “inclusive, participatory democratic governance beyond 2015.”

In the United States, the Sunlight Foundation analyzed the White House Office of Management and Budget’s opposition to portions of the DATA ACT and changes to the Senate version of the bill which weaken the bills data standardization provisions. It also has continued a webinar series on enhancing transparency in political finance, with past webinars viewable here. Elsewhere, GCN profiled the GovLab and its new public interest lab network.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Chile, Chile Transparente celebrated the passing of new legislation to create a public register of lobbyists and lobbying. Previously, Chile Transparente marked the new year with articles looking at the accomplishments of the transparency movement worldwide, and commented on the specific challenges facing Chile that lay ahead.

Poplus, the network founded by mySociety and Ciudadano Inteligente, launched a new platform called SayIt. SayIt makes it easier to launch websites to track and publish politicians’ speeches, interviews, and the proceedings of trials.

In Azerbaijan, the International Human Rights Protection Association condemned the arrest of Anar Mammadli, Chairman of the Election Monitoring and Democracy Studies Center (EMDS), on charges of tax evasion and abuse of office as baseless, illegal, and suspect, given EMDS’ reports of abuse during the October Presidential Election. You can find the final report of OSCE’s election observation mission on Azerbaijan’s Presidential Election on the EMDS website. A timeline is available here.

In the United States, the Sunlight Foundation announced a new initiative to increase political finance transparency, including a free webinar series. Sunlight also launched a new version of the Congress app, incorporating legislative district maps with Mapbox technology. The Economist published a neat data visualization on polarization in American politics, drawing on Govtrack.us data.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Ukraine, protests against the government were met with brutal force. TI Ukraine expressed “burning indignation” at the government’s response. CHESNO offered dramatic videos from the legislative chamber on a no-confidence vote in the Parliament, as well as a vote to keep former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko imprisoned. Opora demanded action against the culprits and called for a support for the no-confidence vote.

In the United Kingdom, mySociety requested input on a survey about the UK Parliament’s online services and wrote about how critical research is key to the “civic power” sector. The UK Parliament recently held a hackathon (list of projects here, collected tweets here), while the House of Lords launched a new website to engage members. A number of CSOs participated in an “Open House” event on reforming the House of Commons. Simon Burall of Involve has follow-up thoughts here.

In Uruguay, DATA announced its recent membership in the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency (LALT Network), particularly relevant now that Uruguay is part of the Open Government Partnership’s Legislative Openness Working Group.

Click here to read more.

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 OpeningParliament.org community:

In Germany, there was much activity in advance of the September 22 national elections. TechPresident highlighted the efforts of Tilo Jung’s series of Youtube videos to connect the younger electorate with candidates. Parliament Watch showcased a different public information series on Youtube. The PMO recently launched a new voter information tool called Candidate Watch and examined candidates who are committed to more transparency (and questioned those who are not). A new E-Government Act went into effect earlier this month and the CDU party recently released a “Merkel-App.”

In Chile, Matt Compton, deputy director of online content for the Digital Strategy Office of the White House, visited Chile Transparente to talk about the We The People platform and other citizen engagement efforts. Chile Transparente also held a seminar on transparency in political parties, featuring perspectives from Mexico and Germany. The Chilean parliament recently launched a new video transmission tool to increase parliamentary transparency.

In the United Kingdom, mySociety revealed a new name for the codebase associated with PMO platforms TheyWorkForYou, Mzalendo, and others: Pombola, a combination of “PMO” and “Tombola.” The code is generating interest around the world and will be used in the upcoming Zimbabwean PMO platform Kuvakazim. mySociety’s FOI website recently reached the milestone of 50,000 registered users and posted a case study on Fatequalcosa.it, a platform to improve government service delivery in Italy.  

Click here to read more.