News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Guatemala, Congreso Transparente is promoting an online campaign to press the Congress to adopt a Manual on Legislative Transparency, which is based on the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness.

In Chile, Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, Fundación Pro Acceso, and Chile Transparente released an open letter raising concerns about a bill before Congress that would  amend the Chilean FOI law. In light of the current scandal, Sunlight Foundation and other regional PMOs also released a statement calling on the government to reform political finance regulations and the relationship between the public and private sectors.

Also in Chile, Fundacion Ciudadano Inteligente released a study reviewing Chilean president Michelle Bachelet’s first year in office. The results showed that after one year in office she has introduced 41.8% of the laws promised during her campaign.   

In Morocco, Sim Sim Participation Citoyenne launched a new tool on its Nouabook.ma website that allows citizens to ask questions and get answers from their MPs using video. In particular, the new feature will help illiterate citizens interact directly with their MPs.    

In Uganda, Parliament Watch held a tweet chat with young MPs to discuss youth representation and how to make legislation more relevant to young people. Participants highlighted the importance of social media in bringing discussions about governance to the citizens and improving communication between youth and their representatives.

In Colombia, Transparencia por Colombia released results for the fourth national survey on anti-bribery practices in the private sector as well as an assessment that considers the transparency of sub-national government agencies.   

In Ecuador, Observatorio Legislativo presented a report analyzing the performance of  Ecuador’s National Assembly over the last two years. The report reviews laws discussed, MPs’ individual performance, government oversight, and institutional transparency.   

In the UK, following recent elections, MySociety has updated WriteToThem.com to allow citizens to contact newly elected MPs.

In Georgia, Transparency International Georgia won a freedom of information case against Georgia’s Ministry of Interior. This court decision sets a precedent that would make it more difficult government agencies to refuse information requests based on personal data protection claims. The organization also released its annual report.

In Cambodia, the Committee for Free and Fair Elections released an educational video to raise awareness about electoral reform, specifically looking at reforms that will improve elections in the country.

In Mexico, Borde Politico, in association with Harvard University and New York University, released an infographic that summarizes the results of a study which tracked the use of funds earmarked for infrastructure by municipal governments. The study reviewed audits from Mexico’s Supreme Audit Institution to identify how much money municipal governments had to invest in infrastructure and to find out what proportion of those funds was used to develop infrastructure projects that meet the needs of the poor.

In Spain, Fundacion Civio, in association with el  El Confidencial, Tecnilógica, Iron Hack, and CartoDB, hosted a hackathon exploring new ways to use, create, and share electoral information.  

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In the Netherlands, more than 400 municipalities will go to the polls on March 19. Research conducted by Open State, in collaboration with students from the University of Utrecht, recently concluded that information about local council voting records remains difficult to find or nonexistent for most municipalities across the country.  

In the United States, the Governance Lab at New York University announced the formation of a Research Network on Opening Governance, which will seek to develop blueprints for more effective and legitimate democratic institutions. The project was made possible through a three year grant of $5 million, from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as well as a gift from Google.org.

Elsewhere In the United States, GovTrack.us released comprehensive report cards on a range of subjects, including government transparency, for Members of Congress for 2013. In February, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) completed its efforts to provide House of Representatives bill summaries in XML format for bulk data download. While GPO already makes available House bills, the Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, and other documents from the executive branch in XML, the new feature will increase the availability of objective descriptions of complex legislative text, and is thus an important step in the House Leadership’s goal of increasing transparency.  

In Venezuela, Transparency Venezuela launched a report on the activities of the National Assembly in 2013, focusing in particular on the committees of Finance and Comptroller. Transparency also released a report in January on the latest developments in the Petrocaribe Energy Cooperation Agreement, detailing issues with Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  

In South Africa,  the Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) published an article about shrinking the accountability deficit created by a system where voters cannot directly call on individual public representatives on the basis that their votes put them there. The article highlighted a recent CSO initiative, the People’s Assembly website, to facilitate public participation. The website provides critical information in an easily understandable format to members of the public.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In India, PRS Legislative Research released two very interesting documents: a concept note entitled “Rethinking the Indian Parliament” and a series of data visualizations of parliamentary activity. These accompanied PRS’s annual conference on effective legislatures, the lectures of which are available here. The visualizations were constructed from their firsthand data gathering, available here. The latest PRS report on parliamentary performance is available here. The Indian parliament passed a bill to form a new anti-corruption agency.

In Nigeria, CISLAC published a guide to understanding the parliamentary ethics and conduct regime, defining the problems that exist, and identifying the role of MPs. CISLAC also provided an overview of the two-day Seminar on “African State Legislatures: Subnational Politics and National Power” organized by Landmark University Omu-Aran in collaboration with National Endowment for Democracy and University of America in Omu-Aran, Kwara.

In Tunisia, Al Bawsala, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Carter Center issued a joint statement on urging the National Constituent Assembly to ensure the new constitution of Tunisia is brought into conformity with international human rights standards and obligations of the country under international law.

In Zimbabwe, a new parliamentary monitoring platform was launched: KuvakaZim. The founders state, “The KuvakaZim project was born from a general concern regarding the accountability and activities of Zimbabwean members of Parliament and their duties in regard of their representative roles.” mySociety also wrote a post about this new platform, as KuvakaZim is utilizing their Pombola platform.

Click here to read more.

I’m back after a break last week with a lot of PMO-related news items. Don’t forget, the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness is being launched tomorrow. We now have nearly 85 supporting organizations from 60 countries! Remember to watch the session (10:15am Rome local time) at the live stream of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, located here. It should be very interesting to watch how more than 400 MPs and parliamentary staff from around the world receive the document. Don’t forget to tweet to the hashtag #OPENparl (and the World e-Parliament Conference hashtag #WEPC2012). 

Now to some news:

In the US, the code for an online platform for crowd-sourcing comments on legislative markup, MADISON, was released on Github. Check out this article from O'Reilly Radar. The MADISON program was announced by the chairman of the House Oversight Committee back at the end of 2011. Now that it’s open source, legislatures around the world have the ability to use the code to create a platform for hosting their own discussions on bills. This story was also covered by TechPresident.

In Chile, one of the major challenges confronted by open government advocates and PMOs like Ciudadano Inteligente is that government information is copyrighted. Check out this blog post from Global Voices, featuring a video testimonial with Ciudadano Inteligente on the subject. Also this week, Ciudadano Inteligente along with another PMO community member, Corporación Participa, and others, submitted a proposal to the Chilean Senate that aims to make explicit the right of the public to access government information, citing the desire to reach the standard set by first-world countries like Sweden, Belgium and Norway, but also its neighbors Mexico, Peru and Colombia. The story was written about in the Chilean media, El Mostrador.

Click here to read more.

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)

Click here to read more.