News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In India, PRS Legislative Research released two very interesting documents: a concept note entitled “Rethinking the Indian Parliament” and a series of data visualizations of parliamentary activity. These accompanied PRS’s annual conference on effective legislatures, the lectures of which are available here. The visualizations were constructed from their firsthand data gathering, available here. The latest PRS report on parliamentary performance is available here. The Indian parliament passed a bill to form a new anti-corruption agency.

In Nigeria, CISLAC published a guide to understanding the parliamentary ethics and conduct regime, defining the problems that exist, and identifying the role of MPs. CISLAC also provided an overview of the two-day Seminar on “African State Legislatures: Subnational Politics and National Power” organized by Landmark University Omu-Aran in collaboration with National Endowment for Democracy and University of America in Omu-Aran, Kwara.

In Tunisia, Al Bawsala, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Carter Center issued a joint statement on urging the National Constituent Assembly to ensure the new constitution of Tunisia is brought into conformity with international human rights standards and obligations of the country under international law.

In Zimbabwe, a new parliamentary monitoring platform was launched: KuvakaZim. The founders state, “The KuvakaZim project was born from a general concern regarding the accountability and activities of Zimbabwean members of Parliament and their duties in regard of their representative roles.” mySociety also wrote a post about this new platform, as KuvakaZim is utilizing their Pombola platform.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Spain, the PMO Civio launched a new project called Quién Manda, or “Who Rules?”  The project aims to monitor the interactions of Spanish politicians and officials with corporate leaders by an innovative photo-tagging scheme. Thus far, they’ve identified over 2500 relationships. Recently, a Sunlight Foundation team member worked with Civio in the lead up to the launch. There is still an active crowd-funding campaign for the initiative on Goteo. 

Elsewhere in Spain, a Spanish lawmaker held an attempt at direct democracy related to a transparency bill, a vital effort given Spain’s recent ranking of 75 out of 96 countries on access to information issues. Last month, the Masters of Media project commented on the Spanish status quo and Que Hacen Los Diputados discussed what the Congress needs to provide to ensure transparency.

In Pakistan, PILDAT released a number of reports, including on: the first meeting of a senate parliamentary friendship group on Afghanistan; the first 100 days of governance at the national and provincial levels; and two reports on the Pakistan-Afghanistan Parliamentary dialogues.

In Venezuela, Transparencia Venezuela released a report on the nation’s budget for the first half of 2013, and condemned corruption in the country and noted the role of civil society in combatting it. Meanwhile Entorno Parlamentario discussed key upcoming bills and opposition to an anti-corruption law.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Argentina, a number of CSOs, including Directorio Legislativo, Poder Ciudadano, and Asociación Civil por la Igualdad y la Justicia (ACIJ) have partnered with the newspaper La Nacion to launch an interactive website revealing the financial statements of MPs, public officials, and judges. This video (Spanish) explains more about the project, which was 10 years in the making.

In Germany, the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany organized a youth civic hacking event. OKFN Germany’s August activities report is available here. Meanwhile, Parliament Watch examined extra income received by German politicians.

In the United States, the Sunlight Foundation announced procurement open data guidelines to help shape how governments release data on their procurement process. Elsewhere in the U.S., GovTrack founder Josh Tauberer was featured in a profile, the city of San Francisco will test online participatory budgeting, Code For America discussed why civic hacking matters, Fast Company profiled PopVox, and the makers of Politify (now called Outline) finalized a deal to create a “public policy dashboard” for the state of Massachusetts. Outline was also a winner of a Knight Award (the most recent of which went to community-focused open government projects).

In Georgia, Transparency International Georgia detailed key aspects of the new “personal data protection inspector” position and pushed for a proactive publication of government information. JumpStart Georgia also issued a similar call, highlighting its work to make election and parliamentary data open and accessible.

Click here to read more.

Yesterday, my colleagues and I participated in the launch of Making All Voices Count (MAVC), a new public-private partnership among the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), UK Department for International Development (DFID), the government of Sweden and the Omidyar Foundation – the latter of which helps fund OpeningParliament.org. The partnership will provide up to $45 million to support innovation and research that harnesses new technology around citizen and government engagement and responsiveness.

MAVC, inspired by the Open Government Partnership (OGP), is a great opportunity that will offer support to projects that create and repair links between governments and citizens. Funding opportunities are anticipated to open in Spring 2013, so keep a close watch on MAVC’s website.

The National Democratic Institute (NDI) was invited to attend the launch to participate in a showcase of organizations doing innovative work in this field. As part of that, we were able to present OpeningParliament.org and the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, along with some of NDI’s other work. Among the other organizations presenting were Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente from Chile, a supporting organization and member of the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency (LALT Network); Co-Creation Hub Nigeria, a social innovation hub and technology lab in Lagos, Nigeria; SeeClickFix, web tool that allows reporting of non-emergency neighborhood issues; and Citizens Foundation, an Icelandic organization that developed a web-based democracy tool.

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.

One quick reminder before I share some interesting articles: comment on the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness and the accompanying commentary here. The document would benefit greatly from your input, including your own country’s parliamentary practices and progress towards openness. Also, if you’d like your organization to be associated with the Declaration, both on the web and in print, shoot me an email with your logo. Now onto the news:

In Tunisia, organizations that are members of the group OpenGovTN, including the PMO Al Bawsala, are launching formal complaints against the National Constituent Assembly for failing provide parliamentary information like voting and attendance records and commission reports, as required by law. Read more about that in a blog post from OpenGovTN and an article from the Tunis Afrique Press (both in French).

In the United Kingdom, the group MySociety announced that they have received a $2.9 million grant from the Omidyar Foundation to fund efforts to internationalize their websites and help organizations around the world to promote transparency and accountability in government by building their own websites and apps. Check out Tom Steinberg’s announcement on the MySociety blog or this article in techPresident to read about it.

Click here to read more.

Just a few interesting news items to share that I’ve come across in the past week. If there have been any happenings in your own countries or if you want to share any recent work, please feel free to reply. Thanks to Maria for sharing some news from Latin America, and to Eric for an update on the great new Scout tool from the Sunlight Foundation.

In Hong Kong, SynergyNet released their report on the Governance Performance of the HKSAR Government 2012, a press release and the report are available here.

In Hungary, the government has expressed an intention to join the Open Government Partnership (OGP) after a long campaign by numerous NGOs. The PMO K-Monitor has released a set of recommendations for the government to become more open, detailed in this post on their blog.

India and the US launched a bilateral effort to utilize a new Open Government Platform. This open source software includes a data management system, web site, and social networking community support. More information is available on the project’s website at http://www.opengovplatform.org/.

Zambia: Constitution coalition asks government to publicise budget (Post Zambia)

Click here to read more.