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Posts tagged "Malawi"

PMO News Update Vol. 25

Posted July 18, 2013 at 9:28am by dustinpalmer

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Spain, Fundación Ideas and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) hosted a number of organizations in a discussion on the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, which included participation by Miguel Angel Gonzalo, webmaster of the Spanish Chamber of Deputies, and Michal Skop of KohoVolit.eu . Participants discussed various aspects of the Declaration, in particular how the Spanish parliament meets or fails to meet its provisions, including on issues of access to information and using search engines and alert services. Qué Hacen Los Diputados posted an informative article about the Declaration in the Spanish context (for current affairs, see this blog post) and also an article on the Spanish legislative process more generally. Qué Hacen Los Diputados is currently fundraising to expand their website and services. Finally, La Fundación Ciudadana Civio called for political parties and the Spanish Congress to make their finances public.

In Latin America, the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency (LALT Network), alongside International IDEA Peru and others participated in a seminar on information technologies and citizen engagement with parliaments. Participants discussed turning technologies into civic education, the concept of “digital citizenship”, and efforts toward parliamentary transparency and integrity. The presentation by Manuel Arís on the mission of the LALT Network is available here. For more information on transparency efforts in the region by LALT and OpeningParliament.org, see this recent article by Ernesto Diaz Diego-Iturbe. The Nieman Journalism Lab recently covered open data and transparency efforts in the region.

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PMO News Update: Vol. 20

Posted February 20, 2013 at 2:46pm by danswislow

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Croatia, a new freedom of information law has been adopted. The law outlines the types of information that must be made public and calls for proactive publishing of this data by government agencies and bodies. GONG, a Croatian parliamentary monitoring organization, provided input and amendments to the law during its drafting, which were adopted.

In Botswana, the Botswana Speaks Parliamentary Initiative was recently launched with the help of Gov2u and other partners. The initiative, similar to the USpeak platform in Uganda, intends to improve governance and bring more voices into the policy-making discussion by connecting MPs directly with citizens through SMS messaging.

In Mexico, Fundar continues to work with MPs who are interested in redesigning the parliament’s website in order to make it more responsive to citizens. MPs cite the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency’s index and the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness as guides for this work. MPs held a Legislative Dialogues for a Digital Mexico meeting with activists, civil society organizations, and scholars calling for the creation of a new federal agency that would address a growing digital divide, work towards universal access to information, and drive Mexico’s broad digital agenda.

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How PMOs are using the Declaration (Part 1)

Posted November 16, 2012 at 11:00am by danswislow

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.

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PMO News Update: Vol. 13

Posted October 17, 2012 at 10:35am by danswislow

Here’s some news from the last two weeks:

In Ireland, the PMO KildareStreet, which has been without data since September 18 because of the Irish Parliament (Houses of the Oireachtas) ceasing to publish XML data, has started a fundraising campaign to raise money to support a redevelopment of their website that will allow them to independently scrape parliamentary data. Click here to support KildareStreet’s resurrection.

In Africa, a regional network of PMOs met for the first time in Accra, Ghana, in September after first coming together at the PMO conference in Washington in April/May. One participant, the Institute for Empirical Research in Political Economy in Beninwrote a short post about the event. The conference was led by the Ghana Center for Democratic Development and allowed for discussions on the formal creation of an African network, creating a study that maps existing PMOs in Sub Saharan Africa, and the use of the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. Participants from KenyaUganda and Malawi, among others, were also involved. (It’d be great to hear a report from any members here who attended!)

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