News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Montenegro, the Center for Democratic Transitions (CDT) was selected as one of the four winners of the UNDP competition “Technology for Citizen Engagement.” The award provides small grants to support ideas for using technology to expand opportunities for citizen engagement. CDT’s  winning idea was Ask for Data, a tool that will allow citizens to easily request information from public institutions.

In Kenya, Muslims for Human Rights released a video raising awareness about the right to know how MPs are spending constituency development funds. The constituency development fund, which is intended to support development projects in MPs’ constituencies, lacks meaningful oversight.

In Greece, Vouliwatch recently released its first annual report, highlighting the role of digital technology in allowing citizens to follow parliamentary issues, ask questions to MPs, and to share ideas and proposals. The organization also announced that it will begin to provide information about the activities, discussions, and decisions of the European Parliament related to Greece and other key policy issues.

In Pakistan, Pakistan Institute for Legislative Development and Transparency (PILDAT) released two scorecards measuring the quality of governance at the federal and provincial levels of government.   

In Chile, Chile Transparente released a report on the transparency of political parties. The report concludes that although there was overall improvement compared to previous years, political parties still have weak programmatic and financial transparency.

In Georgia, Jumpstart Georgia’s Gender Pay Game was selected as a finalist for the Data Journalism Awards 2015. Winners will be announced during the Data Journalism Awards Ceremony at the General Editors Network Summit in Barcelona on June 18.

In Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, and Nigeria, Open Knowledge and Code for Africa announced the 2015 cohort of Open Government Fellows. The new fellows will promote increased government transparency and improved dialogue between citizens and governments.

In Europe, more than 100 groups issued a letter to urge the European Commission to make the lobby register legally binding. The letter also calls on the Commission to ban meetings with unregistered lobbyists and to allocate appropriate resources for monitoring and enforcement of this rule.

In Kuwait, Kuwait Transparency Society celebrated its 10th Anniversary.

In Mexico, the Senate, in cooperation with the National Democratic Institute, hosted a three day workshop on Promoting Legislative Transparency. The training covered several tools and methodologies to improve civil society’s capacity to use data to monitor parliamentary activities.  

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News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Paraguay, the President of the Senate signed a cooperation agreement with Semillas para la Democracia and the National Democratic Institute, agreeing to collaborate on developing initiatives to increase legislative transparency. The agreement includes a commitment from the Senate to strengthen legislative measures against corruption and to help build the capacity of civil society to monitor its work.

In South Africa, People’s Assembly launched the Members Interests Browser, which tracks data on MPs’ interests. Its features enable greater analysis than the PDF files published by Parliament, including features that allow users to filter and count interest declarations and explore the third parties referred to in declarations.

In Italy, OpenPolis published an Index of Parliamentary Productivity for 2014 that assesses the efficacy of MPs in performing parliamentary duties and passing legislation.

In Jordan, the Al-Hayat Center’s RASED Program released its first weekly report on the 2nd Ordinary Session of Jordan’s Parliament. Among other items, it drew attention to MPs attempting to form parliamentary committees outside official parliamentary procedures, which stipulate that the executive office appoints committees based on proportional representation of parliamentary blocs.

In Spain, Access Info Europe outlined a series of concerns about the Council of Transparency and Good Governance, a new body tasked with upholding governmental transparency requirements and citizens’ right of access to public information. Additionally, Access, Que Hacen Los Diputados, and CIVIO are calling for the immediate implementation of a law on public access to information, following the recent discovery that several MPs have used public funds to pay for personal travel.  

In Nigeria, the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre participated in a forum at the National Assembly focused on the need to generate greater engagement between civil society and the legislature on four thematic issues, including local government autonomy, government/CSO relations, minimum wages, and the 2015 general elections.

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Photo credit: Making All Voices Count

On September 15, Making All Voices Count (MAVC), a global initiative that aims to create opportunities for new ideas and technologies that strengthen citizen engagement and government responsiveness, is launching its second Global Innovation Competition (GIC). In this year’s competition, Making All Voices Count is seeking ideas relating to four themes, including legislative openness. 

£300,000 in grants are available to winners who propose projects in a limited set of countries: Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Indonesia, the Philippines, Liberia, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Mozambique, Uganda and Nigeria.

This announcement comes on the heels of the Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW), being organized by the Legislative Openness Working Group of the Open Government Partnership, that will see events and conversations relating to legislative openness happening around the world. The GIC offers an important platform to help translate many of these discussions into new tools and innovations to help parliaments better represent citizens, and to help citizens better engage and communicate with their elected representatives.

You can read more about the competition at MAVC’s website.

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.

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News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Portugal, a petition that began to circulate in March calls for more comprehensive information access on the voting records of Members of Parliament on the parliament’s website. While the website currently holds a record of activity for each member, determining how an individual votes for a particular measure can be difficult. The initiative is similar to another petition, that would create an electronic registry on the votes of each representative in the National Assembly. Transparencia Hackday, a Declaration endorser, has supported these measures.

In the United Kingdom, mySociety interviewed Flavio Zeni about the Akoma Ntoso metadata format for the recently launched SayIt platform (for more on Akoma Ntoso implementation around the world, see Robert Richards’ list here). mySociety reviewed the UK Parliament’s online services last month (report available here), while Computing.com recently provided a look at technology in the British Parliament, including widening access to parlaimentary information (H/T Robert Richards).

In Hungary, the Public Policy Institute (PPI) released its report on parliamentary activities in 2013, drawing attention to several important issues, including the quality of projects initiated by parliamentarians, chronic absenteeism, abuse of tacit adoption procedures, failure to exercise legislative power to rein in the executive branch, and encouragement of political migration by some parties.

In Nigeria, CISLAC outlined various advocacy positions and strategies for engagement during the recently convened National Conference. CISLAC emphasized that beyond discussing contentious historical issues at the conference, the government needed to set the agenda “inclusive, participatory democratic governance beyond 2015.”

In the United States, the Sunlight Foundation analyzed the White House Office of Management and Budget’s opposition to portions of the DATA ACT and changes to the Senate version of the bill which weaken the bills data standardization provisions. It also has continued a webinar series on enhancing transparency in political finance, with past webinars viewable here. Elsewhere, GCN profiled the GovLab and its new public interest lab network.

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News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Venezuela, Transparencia Venezuela outlined various civil rights in response to the worsening human rights situation in Venezuela. Earlier in February, the group joined with Forum for Life and other Venezuelan organizations to issue a statement condemning the increasing violence, arbitrary detention, and spread of misinformation by the government.

The European Parliament recently called on the government of Venezuela to disarm pro-government militant groups targeting ongoing protests with impunity. In a joint resolution, the Parliament called for the dispatch of a European-led monitoring group to Venezuela and for the Maduro government to withdraw arrest warrants issued for opposition leaders.

In the Ukraine, CHESNO suggested five criteria for the composition of a new cabinet of ministers and other management authorities in Ukraine. The President of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly (who has previously blogged on OpeningParliament) stated that the Assembly should play a strong role in direct talks between Ukraine and Russia.

Meanwhile, OPORA reported that documents taken from the Party of Regions headquarters in Chernivtsi may reveal violations of the 2012 electoral law, including the improper use of administrative resources by the Party, indirect vote-buying, using indirect Party representatives to obtain a majority in the election commissions, and the improper handling and storage of personal data lists.

In Afghanistan, the Free and Fair Election Forum (FEFA) released its first election observation report, which analyzes the security and electoral environment and reports violations observed so far in the run up to the April 5 presidential election.

In Mexico, Senator Laura Rojas spoke during Transparency Week in Mexico in support of further efforts to open government, which she said would address public concern with closed door negotiations on appointments, lack of budget transparency, confusion about allocation of resources for parliamentary travel, and many other issues. During Transparency Week activities, Senate President Raul Cervantes announced the creation of a joint commission to recommend actions to increase the transparency of Mexico’s government.

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News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Mexico, Visión Legislativa took on the task of reviewing fast track legislation and the legislative process as established by la Ley Orgánica del Congreso. The article gives a brief overview of some of the best pieces of legislation between the years 1917 and 2000. Visión Legislativa also recently published a history of legislative elections and political parties.

SayIt, a new component of the Poplus network, launched this week. The goal of Poplus, which mySociety and Ciudadano Inteligente founded, is to collaboratively build pieces of technology that make it quicker and cheaper for people around the world to build websites and apps designed to empower citizens.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Centre for Civil Initiatives reports that parliamentarians and citizens participated in 27 public meetings in 2013, providing a forum for parliamentarians and citizens to talk about the current situation on a given topic.

In Georgia, Transparency International Georgia issued a statement urging the Georgian Parliament not to vote for the postponement of a new rule related to witness interrogation during investigations, a process seen as unconstitutional.

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