It has been a busy few months for the global open parliament community! Below, we’ve compiled a collection of updates. With so much great work, we’re certain that we’ve missed some fantastic projects, initiatives, and events. As always, if you would like to see your work included in this News Brief, feel free to reach out to the site administrators on the contact page.

In case you missed it, Global Legislative Openness Week was a success around the world. More information can be found at OpenParlWeek.org, but highlights include:

• The Parliament of Georgia, the Legislative Openness Working Group, and a collection of local and international organizations organized a global legislative openness conference, entitled Committing to Openness: Parliamentary Action Plans, Standards, and Tools. The conference featured over 100 legislators, legislative staff, and civil society representatives from more than 30 countries who shared experiences advancing legislative openness and explored ways in which OGP can be most effectively leveraged to advance public access to legislative information and processes.
• Around the world, mySociety led a crowdsourcing campaign to collect structured, reusable data on politicians in 201 countries. This information is now public and available on their website.
• The Brazilian Chamber of Deputies launched a collection of new tech platforms to foster citizen engagement in the legislative process. To celebrate GLOW, the Chamber launched these new open source services for use outside Brazil.
• In Taiwan, Citizen Congress Watch (TWN) organized the 2015 International Conference on Congressional Reform and Watch, introduced for the first time in Taipei. Topics of discussion included best practices and experience sharing on congressional oversight and promoting transparency and reform in Congress. More information about the conference can be seen here.
• Open Knowledge Danmark, Foreningen Gennemsigt, and the Centre for Voting and Parties hosted an event on open parliamentary data in Denmark. The event, which was live streamed using Periscope, featured discussion of how best to make use of parliamentary data, how to turn it into usable information, and how to make it accessible to a broader audience. 

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Mexico, from Oct 27-29, the Open Government Partnership’s Global Summit convened over 1500 open government advocates from civil society, government, and parliament. Speakers and participants shared experiences from their respective countries and provided real examples of how openness can improve public services, drive economic growth, reduce poverty and make governments more accountable to the people they serve. For the first time, the OGP Summit featured a “track” on legislative openness, which included a number of interesting sessions and a dedicated side meeting for MPs. A blog post sharing more information on the Summit will be posted shortly.

In Argentina, the government made strides forward in opening access to public information when the Chamber of Appeals ruled in favor of Poder Ciudadano, Fundación Directorio Legislativo, and other groups in their request to access administrative decisions made by the Chamber of Deputies. This ruling requires the Chamber to make the results of administrative decisions public by publishing them on its website.

In Kenya, Mzalendo conducted a comprehensive assessment of the contributions that women MPs made to the work of Kenya’s 11th parliament. In addition to a formal report, Mzalendo also published an infographic, which includes a word cloud on issues women MPs most commonly discussed in parliament.

Click here to read more.

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Argentina, CIPPEC, with support of a public TV channel, organized a series of dialogues between young voters and five candidates running to become Mayor of Buenos Aires. To increase reach, each dialogue was broadcast using Google Hangouts and provided opportunities for interaction over social networks.

In Germany, Parliament Watch won a lawsuit calling on the parliament to disclose information on lobbyists who have registered with the Bundestag.

In Uganda, Parliament Watch released a report entitled “Assessment of the Accountability Committees of Parliament”. The assessment found that accountability committees struggle to review and respond to Auditor General reports in a timely manner, creating a large backlog of reports. The assessment concludes with a number of institutional, administrative, and political recommendations to help accountability committees deal with these challenges.

In Croatia, GONG and Code for Croatia launched a new website that allows citizens to request information from more than 6000 public authorities, including the Croatian Parliament.

In Norway, Holder de Ord launched Sagt i Salen (Said in the Parliament), a new feature that shows how many times a certain word has been used in parliamentary debate. This tool facilitates political speech analysis by showing how many times a word has been used in a given year, by a political party, or by an individual MP.   

In Ghana, the Center for Democratic Development began to implement a project called “Building Transparency, Participation and Feedback around Local Government Budgeting and Planning Systems.” The project aims to promote change in “attitudes and behaviors of both the Assembly staff and the citizenry for improved transparency and accountability in the management of local revenue.”

In Georgia, Transparency International released a policy brief calling for the creation of a verification system that would review public officials’ asset declarations. Evidence gathered by TI suggests that a verification system would help ensure that public officials’ asset declarations are complete and accurate. TI also released and assessment of Georgia’s national integrity system.

In Tunisia, Al Bawsala issued a press release with recommendations for improving the draft right to information bill that is currently being considered by the parliament.

Click here to read more.

This post originally appeared on NDI’s DemocracyWorks blog.

The Third International Open Data Conference in Ottawa last week brought together more than 1,000 open data advocates from a diverse array of countries and professional backgrounds to discuss open government and open data. Compared with the First International Open Data Conference – a small gathering of technologists at the World Bank in 2010 – the event’s growth constituted a clear statement that open data is here to stay and the global community of advocates is growing.

The conference demonstrated that the global open data movement has matured and is more focused on the relationship between open data, power and politics. Open data is most transformative and impactful when it improves the relationship between government and the public. Consider legislatures: when used appropriately, open data makes it easier for citizens to access information about the activities of their lawmakers, which helps build public trust and citizen engagement in government. Open legislative data can also empower citizens to effectively monitor and evaluate the performance of their legislature. Unequal access to public information can distort the relationship between citizens and their government; open data can help correct this, empowering broader participation and increasing accountability and understanding.

Click here to read more.

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Montenegro, the Center for Democratic Transitions (CDT) was selected as one of the four winners of the UNDP competition “Technology for Citizen Engagement.” The award provides small grants to support ideas for using technology to expand opportunities for citizen engagement. CDT’s  winning idea was Ask for Data, a tool that will allow citizens to easily request information from public institutions.

In Kenya, Muslims for Human Rights released a video raising awareness about the right to know how MPs are spending constituency development funds. The constituency development fund, which is intended to support development projects in MPs’ constituencies, lacks meaningful oversight.

In Greece, Vouliwatch recently released its first annual report, highlighting the role of digital technology in allowing citizens to follow parliamentary issues, ask questions to MPs, and to share ideas and proposals. The organization also announced that it will begin to provide information about the activities, discussions, and decisions of the European Parliament related to Greece and other key policy issues.

In Pakistan, Pakistan Institute for Legislative Development and Transparency (PILDAT) released two scorecards measuring the quality of governance at the federal and provincial levels of government.   

In Chile, Chile Transparente released a report on the transparency of political parties. The report concludes that although there was overall improvement compared to previous years, political parties still have weak programmatic and financial transparency.

In Georgia, Jumpstart Georgia’s Gender Pay Game was selected as a finalist for the Data Journalism Awards 2015. Winners will be announced during the Data Journalism Awards Ceremony at the General Editors Network Summit in Barcelona on June 18.

In Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, and Nigeria, Open Knowledge and Code for Africa announced the 2015 cohort of Open Government Fellows. The new fellows will promote increased government transparency and improved dialogue between citizens and governments.

In Europe, more than 100 groups issued a letter to urge the European Commission to make the lobby register legally binding. The letter also calls on the Commission to ban meetings with unregistered lobbyists and to allocate appropriate resources for monitoring and enforcement of this rule.

In Kuwait, Kuwait Transparency Society celebrated its 10th Anniversary.

In Mexico, the Senate, in cooperation with the National Democratic Institute, hosted a three day workshop on Promoting Legislative Transparency. The training covered several tools and methodologies to improve civil society’s capacity to use data to monitor parliamentary activities.  

Click here to read more.

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Ghana, CDD Ghana organized a meeting of African parliamentary monitoring organizations that focused on regional approaches to parliamentary monitoring and considered how a regional network of parliamentary openness advocates and champions can be most effectively leveraged to advance legislative transparency and citizen participation.

Also in Ghana, the Parliament of Ghana in collaboration with Penplusbytes and with support from the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) launched the “Connecting Citizens to Parliament” digital platform. The project aims to provide citizens with another avenue through which they can engage with MPs and monitor government performance on certain issues. Citizens can engage with members on the web-platform or via SMS, mobile app, or social media.

In Morocco, the country’s first web platform for public engagement with parliament is off to a strong start. Nouabook has built a solid user base and a number of MPs are responding to citizens’ questions on the platform. Over 40% of the questions posted on the platform have been answered by the member of parliament in question.

In Italy, OpenPolis and ActionAid launched a web-based advocacy tool called U-Act that allows citizens to enter into a dialogue with policy makers. U-Act allows users to submit and support new ideas, which are then sent to members of parliament.

In Kenya, a joint initiative of the Parliamentary Initiatives Network in partnership with and Transparency International Kenya, Kenyans for Peace with Truth and Justice (KPTJ) and Africa Centre for Open Governance (AfriCOG) recently came out with a study titled, “Towards Hazy Horizons.” The study found that that the slow pace of institutional reform and low levels of public awareness and engagement is slowing the implementation of constitutional provisions in chapter six of the constitution.  

In the UK, mySociety is helping constituents track how responsive their MP is on WriteToThem, a tool that allows users to quickly look up who represents them and send those representatives a message. Here, mySociety ranks MPs based on how responsive they were to messages sent using the tool. Some MPs have responded only a handful of times while others have responded to all messages sent over WriteToThem.

Click here to read more.

Recently, the Parliament of Ghana launched the “Connecting Citizens to Parliament” digital platform project in Accra.

The project is to help Parliament’s Committee of Government Assurances (CGA) to undertake its mandate of monitoring all assurances and promises made by the executive arm of government. The project is in collaboration with Penplusbytes with support from the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA).

“Connecting Citizens to Parliament” which started as a pilot last year with funding from STAR-Ghana is now scaled up to reach more citizens with technical and financial support from OSIWA. In this second more wider reaching phase, Penplusbytes has delivered well-developed digital platforms that enhance interaction between the CGA, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), citizens and other stakeholder to better track and monitor assurances and projects promised by government.

The “Connecting Citizens to Parliament” project is set to boost the capacity of the CGA on one hand and citizens on the other by increasing and closing feedback loops via SMS web-platform, mobile app as well as social media tools.

Click here to read more.

As always, please feel free to send updates through the OpeningParliament.org contact page for inclusion in the News Brief.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

Globally, the OGP’s Legislative Openness Working Group organized GLOW, or Global Legislative Openness Week. GLOW consisted of events and activities focused on transparent, participatory legislative processes organized by members of the parliamentary openness community in 30 countries. Further details about event outcomes can be found on the blog.

The voting period for Making All Voices Count’s Global Innovation Competition began October 22 and concludes November 23. The competition includes 241 ideas, many of which were submitted by members of the OP community. The public is encouraged to review these ideas and vote for those they believe will most effectively empower citizens and secure more accountable, open governance in the program’s 12 key countries.

In Latin America, the LALT Network released their 2014 Index of Legislative Transparency, with detailed analysis on the congresses of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, México, Perú, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

In Mexico, the Open Parliament Alliance launched as a collaboration between Congress, the Federal Institute for Access to Information and Data Protection (IFAI), and a coalition of civil society groups with the purpose of ensuring that Mexico’s 32 state legislatures and national congress comply with principles of parliamentary openness.

Mexico also hosted AbreLatam and Con Datos, two important events organized around open government, legislative transparency, and citizen participation. A short Spanish language summary of the conversations that took place at these events can be found here.

In Portugal, the parliament passed a resolution supporting the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness with near identical language to the Declaration itself. The resolution progressed through the entire legislative process, from committee to plenary, before ultimately being passed on July 10.

Click here to read more.