News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

The European Public Sector Information Platform published a report on parliamentary informatics, including how organizations can support parliaments in open data initiatives. Report author Karolis Granickas from TI Lithuania recently discussed the report and other topics on the OpeningParliament blog.

In France, Regards Citoyens updated the citizen open data catalogue at Nosdonnes.fr. The organization proposed an amendment to increase MP voting transparency, offered 10 proposals to increase transparency in light of a fraud scandal in the Minister of the Budget’s office, and weighed in on the debate over new lobbying rules in the National Assembly.

In Argentina, the legislature of the city of Buenos Aires endorsed the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. A video from the legislature is available here.

In South Africa, the Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) published a case study entitled “Getting Information to the People: The Role of the Parliamentary Monitoring Group.” The report includes a description of PMG’s mission and activities, brief sections on what challenges and opportunities face PMOs around the world, and suggestions for future activities.

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News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

This section is devoted to news from parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) listed as ‘Supporting Organizations’ of the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness and OpeningParliament.

In Peru, work from Asociación Civil Transparencia has been highlighted recently in the media. The publication La Republica cited figures from a recent Transparencia report that showed a large portion of the Peruvian population not feeling represented by their legislator. In another article, the organization’s Secretary General talked about the need to balance transparency and accountability with providing MPs the resources they need to complete their job.

The Israeli PMO Hasadna’s project Open Knesset was profiled in a recent piece in TechPresident, which detailed the website’s success in using monitoring information on MPs to inform voters in recent elections.

In Montenegro, the Center for Democratic Transition released a list of eight recommendations for improving governance and transparency in the country’s parliament. View it here.

In Taiwan, Citizen Congress Watch (CCW) announced that the previous year’s congress was ranked ‘useless’ after passing only about 10 percent of the legislation passed in previous years. CCW also announced the top ten news items about the legislature from the previous year. Check out the Taipei Times coverage of CCW’s report.

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This is Part 2 of a blog post on how PMOs are using the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. You can view Part 1 here.

The first part of this post took a look at some of the ways that parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) around the world have been using the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness to enhance their efforts to advocate for democratic reform in their home countries. These are still early days for this new network of PMOs, and the Declaration is only one small piece of a much broader set of efforts led by many different actors.

Yet, there is reason to be optimistic about the contribution of the Declaration. What started as an idea by a small group of PMOs moved forward fairly quickly from an initial conference in May, to collaboration among a broader group of PMOs over the summer, to a global launch at the 2012 World e-Parliament Conference in Rome in September, to now more than 100 supporting partners from all regions of the world sharing in the the initiative. PMOs have begun successfully introducing this work to parliamentarians and parliamentary staff on an international stage, while using it to enhance their work at home.

While advocacy at the international level – engaging international organizations and parliamentary events – will continue to be important, real impact will likely come more from the effective use of international solidarity among PMOs and the Declaration to reinforce the efforts of individual PMOs at the national and regional level. Great potential also lies in the ability to rapidly exchange knowledge and information on the issues that the Declaration espouses.

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