Issues of legislative openness and citizen engagement were highlighted at the European and Asia Pacific regional meetings of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) last week, as NDI and partners in the Chilean Congress organized sessions of the Legislative Openness Working Group.

At the Asia Pacific regional conference in Bali (May 6-7), an event hosted by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel of high-level officials from government, parliament and civil society. The panel delved into the challenges that parliaments face in engaging citizens who often have a declining trust in government.

New Zealand Internal Affairs Minister Peter Dunne described his government’s use of technology to respond to citizens’ increasing expectations, saying, “Not only are people much more willing to engage using the Internet, they expect to transact and engage via the Internet.” Dunne said that nearly 60 percent of New Zealanders report using government services online, a win-win. “This shift in the use of technology gives governments the ability to reach a wider audience for lower cost.”

Panelists address the audience in a LOWG session at the OGP Asia Pacific regional conference in Indonesia.

New Zealand also has ascribed this strategy to the legislative branch. It was the first country to attempt to crowdsource citizen input into legislation, creating an online “wiki” to collect citizens’ ideas on the 2008 Policing Act. The Parliament continues to allow online citizen submissions around draft bills under consideration as part of its recently launched beta.govt.nz website, which also provides a plethora of information about parliamentary activity.

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 parliamentary monitoring community:

In Germany, Parliament Watch described efforts to get candidates to sign a transparency pledge ahead of the September elections. Parliament Watch also recently worked with their media partner Der Spiegel to create an interactive election website for citizens to guess the outcomes of upcoming elections. Elsewhere, the German branch of the Open Knowledge Foundation visited the Code for America offices in San Francisco to begin the “Code for All” international partnership. A monthly report of all OKF Germany’s July activities is available here.

In Peru, the Congress faced a battery of criticism over appointments to a number of key posts in the country, with President Ollanta Humala calling on some of the new appointees to step down. Entorno Parlamentario suggested four areas of reform (and Transparencia Peru a further three), while La Republica criticized the ethics committee for lack of sanctioning members who receive formal complaints.

In Afghanistan, the Free & Fair Elections Forum (FEFA) released their June 2013 parliamentary monitoring report, which highlighted a number of positive developments, including on the activities of the Oversight Committee on Performance of the Government and the Committee on Women’s Affairs.

In Argentina, a new voting record tracking app, the winner of an April 2013 hackathon won seed funding to further develop and scale. An interview with the team is available and the source code is available on GitHub.

Click here to read more.

Organization: mySociety
Project: Alaveteli, a freedom of information request platform
Country: Uruguay, Brazil, Croatia, Spain, UK, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Hungary, New Zealand, Australia
Government Level: All levels, inclusive of private enterprises, universities, and other public information holders

Overview: Alaveteli is a platform designed to facilitate the submission of freedom of information requests to the relevant authority to improve access to information for all citizens.

Click here to read more.

Some housekeeping items: 

1. Comment on the Declaration has officially closed (although that’s not to say we’re no longer listening to your input), and we will begin preparing it for publication and release on September 15 at the World e-Parliaments Conference in Rome. We hope to have this process completed within about one week so that we can make the final document available for translation into multiple languages (if you are interested in translating, please let us know). Keep checking this email list and OpeningParliament.org for more information as that process moves forward.
2. We have started to post the logos and websites of participating organizations at OpeningParliament.org/Organizations. If you don’t see your organization there, send me an email with your logo!
3. In just the past week, I’ve learned about organizations doing parliamentary monitoring work in Ukraine, Bulgaria and Benin. We’ll be working to get these organizations involved in this network, and I just wanted to encourage everyone who reads these emails to notify us if you know of other organizations doing this type of work around the world that might not be on our radar.

Onto some news:

In Mexico, an editorial appeared in La Silla Rota, a well-known online publication, about the efforts of this PMO network to draft the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. It explains the importance of an international Declaration in the context of Mexico’s parliament, citing gaps in Mexico’s adherence to the provisions in the document and calling for more openness. The article also mentions OpeningParliament.org and the recent conference in Paris. (English translation)

A newly formed PMO in Ukraine, Chesno (“honest”), launched a new website to monitor deputies in the Ukrainian Parliament. The tool reports on MPs attendance records, income declarations, votes, political promises, and corruption. Check out articles on the new website in TechPresident and the Kyiv Post.

Click here to read more.