Thanks to NDI project assistant Greg Brown for his help in compiling these updates. Please send us your own news – it makes these updates much easier to compile.

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Mexico, apart from the Senate’s endorsement of the Declaration, a group of activists and civil society representatives presented the five winners of the #App115 contest. The initiative convinced the Congress to cancel an unnecessarily expensive contract to build an app by mobilizing hackers to build the app for almost no cost at all, saving more than 110 million pesos. Read all about the story on TechCrunch.

This week in Poland, the PMO ePanstwo Foundation re-launched their comprehensive parliamentary monitoring website, Sejmometr. Back in February, an open source version of their platform called OchParliament was made available on GitHub.

In Italy, OpenPolis has launched a campaign to lobby members of parliament to make information about committee activity available to the public.

In Lebanon, a new coalition of civil society groups was launched, the National Civil Society Parliament Liaison Unit, with the aim of making parliament more transparent and responsive to citizens.

Click here to read more.

Now that the OpeningParliament community has launched the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, the focus of activity is shifting to using it as a tool for advocacy at the country level. More specifically, organizations are seeking to answer the question: how can the Declaration can be used not only to support “open parliaments” for the sake of openness, but also to support the higher level goal of more responsive, accountable and democratic parliaments?

Obviously, the Declaration is only one of many advocacy tools, but it can hopefully serve as a useful roadmap for the world’s parliaments on what a truly open, democratic parliament should look like. It can also help stimulate a global conversation around parliamentary openness between the OpeningParliament community and parliaments. Perhaps most importantly, as John Wonderlich from the Sunlight Foundation put it, the Declaration can help to “validate the work” of parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) worldwide – so that when a PMO seeks to engage the Speaker of Parliament in a particular country, they are doing so not just as an individual NGO or as a group of individual activists, but also a part of a reputable international movement.

Click here to read more.

We’re running a bit late – still catching up after a few days off due to Hurricane Sandy last week. A quick shout out to NDI’s great project assistant, Jack Mahoney, who assisted me in writing this update.

NEWS:

In Spain, the PMO and Declaration supporter Access Info Europe was charged €3,000 by the Spanish Supreme Court for requesting information about how the Spanish government plans to fight corruption. The ruling, which is being appealed, reflects the struggles of NGOs in Spain to obtain information from the government. Spain remains the largest European country without a national transparency law. Also in Europe, Italy‘s Chamber of Deputies recently voted 481 to 19 to approve a new transparency law that Transparency International hailed as a step in the right direction. 

In Kyrgyzstan, the PMO community member Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society released a list of Kyrgyz MPs whose offices did not register with an online consortium of civil society groups. At latest count, a dozen MPs have remained inaccessible to civil society activists and their organizations. The Coalition also reports that an ethics crisis is now consuming the Kyrgyz Parliament.

In Lithuania, PMO community member Transparency International Lithuania launched a simple web platform for users to anonymously report cases of corruption. The website includes a map so citizens can see how their communities are affected by corruption, and also includes a list of tools to help them take action.

Lebanon's Civil Campaign for Electoral Reform gathered well over 100 representatives from the media and civil society groups to hold a 'People’s Parliament’ in Beirut’s Martyr’s Square where participants were given the chance to question MPs on reforms to the electoral law of Lebanon.

Click here to read more.

Greetings from Helsinki. I wanted to briefly report on the very successful launch of the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness that took place in Rome on Saturday, a video of which is available here. I invite other participants to chime in as well. 

The event took place in the Italian Chamber of Deputies on the final day of the World e-Parliament Conference. Aside from the PMO contingent, most participants were MPs or parliamentary ICT staff, and I think around 100 parliaments were represented. The Declaration panel was the second to last of the entire event. Because it was followed by a celebration of the International Day of Democracy, featuring a number of speakers and presidents of parliaments and other high level officials, it was extremely well attended. 

Click here to read more.

The Declaration on Parliamentary Openness will be officially launched at the World e-Parliament Conference 2012 in Rome on Saturday. It’s currently available at OpeningParliament.org in six languages, with seven more coming soon.

My colleague Andrew Mandelbaum is in Rome along with PMO representatives John Wonderlich (Sunlight Foundation, USA), María Baron (LALT Network, Latin America), Aline Pennisi (OpenPolis Association, Italy), Maja Rzeplinska (Association 61, Poland), Gregor Hackmack (ParliamentWatch.org, Germany) and Marwa Abou Dayya (NahwaAl-Muwatiniya, Lebanon), who will present the Declaration to more than 400 members of the parliamentary community – including MPs and parliamentary staff – from 10:15-11:15am (Rome local time) on September 15. You can watch a live stream of the event here.

Many organizations have already begun to plan for launch events of their own in their home countries. If your organization is interested in doing that, we have put together a “model” press release to help, which is available at OpeningParliament.org/press. Please feel free to customize it in any way you’d like, use the quotes, and translate it into your home languages for use with your events. Or write your own!

Lastly, if you’re on Twitter, please tweet to the hashtag #OpenParl and follow it for updates.

Let us know if we can be of assistance in any of these activities.

Looking forward to Saturday!