News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Germany, the Open Knowledge Festival took place in Berlin from July 15-17. A good summary of the event can be viewed here. Members of the OpeningParliament.org community that attended include Foundation ePaństwo, DATA Uruguay, Sunlight Foundation, Fundar, Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, KohoVolit, K-Monitor, Holder de Ord, Hvem Stemmer Hvad, Open Ministry, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, Open State Foundation, Open North, OpenKratio, Hasadna, mySociety, and Access Info.

Elsewhere, Parliament Watch recently announced an online survey that documents the positions of Germany’s 96 MEPs on important policy issues. In addition to the survey, the organization also collected voting behavior of the elected officials during the last parliamentary term.

In Greece, the Ministry of Administrative Reform and E-Government submitted the country’s Action Plan to the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The plan contains ambitious commitments on parliamentary openness and legislative transparency, including the introduction of a system for tracking bill changes, improvements in the usability and functionality of the parliament’s website, provision of historical parliamentary documents, and enhancements of social media policy.

In Ireland, the government launched data.gov.ie, an open data portal that currently supports 419 datasets. The Minister of Public Education and Reform announced the end of application fees for FOI requests. And the government approved the country’s Action Plan for OGP which includes several components to increase citizen participation during the pre-legislative process through consultation with committees and scrutiny of draft bills.

In France, Regards Citoyens initiated a crowdsourcing project that converted declarations of interests for all 925 MPs into open data. The declarations were previously scanned into PDFs by the High Authority on Transparency in Public Life (HATVP). The conversion of these files to open data brings the declarations into line with standards established in October 2013 by France’s law on the transparency of public life.

In Italy, OpenPolis and others have been drawing attention to the country’s need for an FOI law with the #FOIA4Italy campaign. Despite the growing momentum around FOI in recent years, there has been a lack of progress on the issue in parliament. FOIA4Italy plans to submit an FOIA bill based on legislation in countries with advanced access to information laws after crowdsourcing improvements from the Italian public.

In Tunisia, Al Bawsala unveiled a new project, Marsad Baladia, a platform that will monitor the activities of municipalities to generate greater citizen awareness before municipal elections scheduled for 2015. The project has already created a transparency index from the 24 municipalities it has so far observed.

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.

Thanks to Ariana Tuckey for assistance in drafting this post.

Around the world, parliaments, governments, civil society organizations, and even individual parliamentarians, are taking measures to make the legislative process more participatory. Some are creating their own tools – often open source, which allows others to use these tools as well – that enable citizens to markup legislation or share ideas on targeted subjects. Others are purchasing and implementing tools developed by private companies to good effect. In several instances, these initiatives are being conducted through collaboration between public institutions and civil society, while many compliment online and offline experiences to help ensure that a broader population of citizens is reached.

The list below provides examples of some of the more prominent efforts to engage citizens in the legislative process.

Brazil

Implementer: Brazilian Chamber of Deputies
Tool: e-Democracia platform

Description: The e-Democracia platform offers simple web 2.0 tools to allow citizens to interact with lawmakers on specific issues, helping to connect Brazilian citizens to national lawmakers across thousands of miles of geography. Citizens can use the portal and social media platforms to engage Congressmen, mark-up legislation, and propose and debate solutions to policy problems. The platform has facilitated cross-country dialogue among disparate groups and has thousands of active users. It has also improved legislative transparency.

Website: http://edemocracia.camara.gov.br/
Additional Information: OpeningParliament.org Case Study

Click here to read more.

The information in this list was compiled by Andrew Mandelbaum with the assistance of Ariana Tuckey.

Parliaments are increasingly seeking to enable citizens to reuse, mix and republish parliamentary information, recognizing the potential of ordinary citizens to harness technology to explore and analyze data in innovative ways. A primary concern for parliaments and citizens alike is the way parliamentary information is licensed and whether or not it conforms with open data principles, such as those captured in the open definition, the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, or the 10 Principles for Opening Up Government Information. These documents encourage parliaments to publish information in machine­readable formats and to allow for citizen reuse and republication by default (recognizing that exceptions may exist in discrete and narrowly defined cases).

While many parliaments are adopting ‘open licenses’ in order to meet the open standard, others are simply placing information in the public domain. The list below describes the licensing standards that select parliaments are using to allow citizens to reuse and republish parliamentary information.

Australia

Chamber: Parliament of Australia
Website: http://www.aph.gov.au/Help/Disclaimer_Privacy_Copyright
License: Creative Commons BY­NC­ND 3.0
License Wording: Available here.

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 India, one of the newest PMO endorsers, Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS), was featured in an article on right to information efforts. Here is an older article on their important efforts. Elsewhere in India, Chaksu Roy of PRS Legislative Research published an article about the need to simplify the language of legislation. The Hindu recently considered the impact of open government data in India.

In Mexico, Eduardo Bohórquez from Transparencia Mexicana and Melissa Ortiz from Fundar appeared on the Congressional Channel’s Pesos y Contrapesos (checks and balances) to discuss Open Parliament.  A study done by Visión Legislativa and Animal Político found that the Senate failed to release complete information to a request about the amount of contracts made between September 2012 and July 2013.  Visión Legislativa wrote an article about budget transparency and how to apply its principles in the context of Mexico. Curul501, in partnership with Visión Legislativa and Borde Político, launched Presupuesto Abierto (Open Budget). We recently highlighted the work of Curul501 in a case study on OpeningParliament.org

In Italy, citizens are demanding more transparency in the work of parliamentary committees. TechPresident recently covered participatory democracy efforts in the country.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Taiwan, the folks at the PMO g0v.tw have a neat version tracking tool for amendments to existing legislation. An example is here.  

In Ghana, the Africa Freedom of Information Centre and Ghana Right to Information Coalition have praised the government for demonstrating resolve to deepen transparency and good governance as a means of improving the living conditions of Ghanaians by tabling in Parliament the Right to Information Bill.

In Japan, the Guardian reports that officials who leak ‘special state secrets’ and journalists who seek to obtain them could face prison if the proposed state secrets law is passed.

In South Africa, the Right2Know organization continued to mobilize against a Secrecy Bill which was recently passed by the parliament. OKF South Africa covered new efforts to increase transparency on the city of Cape Town’s by-laws.

Click here to read more.