Thanks to NDI project assistant Greg Brown for his help in compiling these updates. Please send us your own news – it makes these updates much easier to compile.

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Mexico, apart from the Senate’s endorsement of the Declaration, a group of activists and civil society representatives presented the five winners of the #App115 contest. The initiative convinced the Congress to cancel an unnecessarily expensive contract to build an app by mobilizing hackers to build the app for almost no cost at all, saving more than 110 million pesos. Read all about the story on TechCrunch.

This week in Poland, the PMO ePanstwo Foundation re-launched their comprehensive parliamentary monitoring website, Sejmometr. Back in February, an open source version of their platform called OchParliament was made available on GitHub.

In Italy, OpenPolis has launched a campaign to lobby members of parliament to make information about committee activity available to the public.

In Lebanon, a new coalition of civil society groups was launched, the National Civil Society Parliament Liaison Unit, with the aim of making parliament more transparent and responsive to citizens.

Click here to read more.

Thanks again to NDI project assistant Jack Mahoney for his help with this update.

NEWS

In Latin America, community member the LALT Network (Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency) launched an index which will help track progress on transparency in Latin American parliaments. The results of the LALT Network’s Latin American Index of Legislative Transparency were presented at CIPPEC, an Argentinian think tank and Declaration supporter. A video of the presentation is viewable here.

In Spain, (following on an earlier news update) Access Info Europe, a Spanish PMO, has drafted a petition which they hope will encourage the government to eliminate a €3000 fine being leveled at them by a Spanish court. The fine resulted from Access Info Europe losing a court battle over an information request from the Ministry of Justice.

In Ghana, PMO partner the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD Ghana) held a debate for aspiring MPs. The debate included four candidates from three parties and one who was an independent. The representatives discussed issues and took questions from the audience about a variety of subjects including unemployment and crime.

South Africa‘s Right2Know campaign has started its Camping Out for Openness near the South African Parliament Monday in protest of efforts by the ruling ANC to rush the passage of a new secrecy bill through to law. They have joined in coalition with other groups to argue that the bill needs to be analyzed by civil society groups and that it violates the spirit of South Africa’s constitution.

Click here to read more.

I’m back after a break last week with a lot of PMO-related news items. Don’t forget, the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness is being launched tomorrow. We now have nearly 85 supporting organizations from 60 countries! Remember to watch the session (10:15am Rome local time) at the live stream of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, located here. It should be very interesting to watch how more than 400 MPs and parliamentary staff from around the world receive the document. Don’t forget to tweet to the hashtag #OPENparl (and the World e-Parliament Conference hashtag #WEPC2012). 

Now to some news:

In the US, the code for an online platform for crowd-sourcing comments on legislative markup, MADISON, was released on Github. Check out this article from O'Reilly Radar. The MADISON program was announced by the chairman of the House Oversight Committee back at the end of 2011. Now that it’s open source, legislatures around the world have the ability to use the code to create a platform for hosting their own discussions on bills. This story was also covered by TechPresident.

In Chile, one of the major challenges confronted by open government advocates and PMOs like Ciudadano Inteligente is that government information is copyrighted. Check out this blog post from Global Voices, featuring a video testimonial with Ciudadano Inteligente on the subject. Also this week, Ciudadano Inteligente along with another PMO community member, Corporación Participa, and others, submitted a proposal to the Chilean Senate that aims to make explicit the right of the public to access government information, citing the desire to reach the standard set by first-world countries like Sweden, Belgium and Norway, but also its neighbors Mexico, Peru and Colombia. The story was written about in the Chilean media, El Mostrador.

Click here to read more.

As usual, some housekeeping: 

• I hope some of you have had the chance to review the final Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. You can also view a regularly updated list of supporting organizations here: there are now 73 PMOs from 53 countries (plus the EU and Latin America, regionally) who have participated in the development of or indicated support for the declaration.
• We’re currently working on a cover design and would like to incorporate translations of the title from multiple languages – if you have a minute, please send us the translation of “Declaration on Parliamentary Openness” into your native language.
• Pedro Markun from Transparencia Hacker in Brazil sent out a survey for global PMOs on technology. This survey will aim to help the community to assess what kind of technological needs exist in PMOs around the world as well as where organizations may have strengths. The ultimate goal here will be to create a ‘tech support group’ to aid fledgling PMOs who need help building websites, website components, or just making technological choices. Please fill out that survey here. Once we have some good data, we’ll work with Pedro to publish the results to you.

Onto some news:

The Argentinian PMO Directorio Legislativo launched their seventh legislative directory entitled, Legislative Directory: Who are our legislators and how do they represent us?. The directory contains a survey of national legislators as well as information on 8 provincial legislatures. The launch of the directory took place at the Argentine Senate and was widely covered by the press. The event included a reform-minded Senator calling for the enactment of a law on access to information.

Click here to read more.