News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Afghanistan, the Free & Fair Election Forum of Afghanistan (FEFA) released its six-month report on parliamentary activities. Findings of the report include the number of plenary and committee sessions held, the number of laws approved, positive developments and shortcomings, as well as recommendations for improvement. The report is published during a critical period in Afghanistan, with  the government in the midst of extended political gridlock preventing the enactment of much needed reforms. FEFA also signed a MoU with the Meshrano Jirga, the upper house of parliament, to conduct a similar assessment, with aims to increase public awareness on parliament’s activities and strengthen the level of cooperation between parliament and civil society.

In Costa Rica, the Alliance for Open Assembly, which includes ACCESA, Abriendo Datos, Costa Rica Íntegra, Iplex, Proledi, and Ojo al Voto, partnered with the Fundación Directorio Legislativo to foment major strides toward openness within the Costa Rican legislature. Together they created and signed a commitment seeking to promote openness, transparency, and accountability. The commitment includes a variety of different components, each working to counter the existing lack of trust in Costa Rican institutions. This commitment combined with the drafting of an action plan for legislative opening seek to strengthen and enable “a more democratic democracy.”

In Mexico, for the tenth anniversary of the Collective for Transparency campaign, Fundar launched #ArmonizaTuLey, an initiative to monitor the process of harmonizing state laws with the new federal regulatory framework for transparency and access to information. With the approval of the constitutional reform in 2013 and the General Act in 2014, Mexico has set up a robust framework that safeguards these rights. Fundar reports that while the deadline for adoption of the new regulatory framework is fast approaching, 29 states in Mexico still have not completed this obligation. The Collective for Transparency calls on legislators to fulfill their legal obligation of harmonizing state laws, respect this timeline for action, and engage citizens in this effort.

In Kenya, Mzalendo Trust announced the second People’s Shujaaz Awards to recognize Parliamentarians for championing issues of high public interest in the National Assembly and Senate in 2015. The final selection was made based on the legislators’ demonstration of leadership, factoring in the motions that were put forth, and statements and petitions they represented. The nominees were chosen in consultation with civil society groups under the Parliamentary Initiatives Network. While Mzalendo hopes that the People’s Shujaaz Awards helps to spotlight the positive achievements and key contributions made in Parliament, Mzalendo also issued a list of lessons learned, with recommendations for the legislature to strengthen its image, communicate its work more effectively with citizens, and find new ways for civic engagement using technology and social media.

In the US, the OpenGov Foundation received a $200,000 grant from the Rita Allen Foundation to support the continued development of an open-source platform to digitize Chicago’s legislative process over the next two years. In partnership with Chicago’s City Clerk’s office, the project aims to keep legislation in standardized, accessible formats, and allow citizens to better share feedback with their elected officials.

In India, PRS Legislative Research published two op-eds on legislative reform in major news outlets.  The authors called to question the effectiveness of India’s legislature, highlighting in particular the decrease in legislative productivity caused by disruptions and lapses in conduct by members. With a detailed breakdown of how time was used during parliamentary proceedings, the articles underscores the necessity of urgent reforms to restore both the Parliament’s role as an effective deliberative body, as well as citizens’ faith in Parliament as a representative institution as a whole.

Click here to read more.

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Ghana, CDD Ghana organized a meeting of African parliamentary monitoring organizations that focused on regional approaches to parliamentary monitoring and considered how a regional network of parliamentary openness advocates and champions can be most effectively leveraged to advance legislative transparency and citizen participation.

Also in Ghana, the Parliament of Ghana in collaboration with Penplusbytes and with support from the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) launched the “Connecting Citizens to Parliament” digital platform. The project aims to provide citizens with another avenue through which they can engage with MPs and monitor government performance on certain issues. Citizens can engage with members on the web-platform or via SMS, mobile app, or social media.

In Morocco, the country’s first web platform for public engagement with parliament is off to a strong start. Nouabook has built a solid user base and a number of MPs are responding to citizens’ questions on the platform. Over 40% of the questions posted on the platform have been answered by the member of parliament in question.

In Italy, OpenPolis and ActionAid launched a web-based advocacy tool called U-Act that allows citizens to enter into a dialogue with policy makers. U-Act allows users to submit and support new ideas, which are then sent to members of parliament.

In Kenya, a joint initiative of the Parliamentary Initiatives Network in partnership with and Transparency International Kenya, Kenyans for Peace with Truth and Justice (KPTJ) and Africa Centre for Open Governance (AfriCOG) recently came out with a study titled, “Towards Hazy Horizons.” The study found that that the slow pace of institutional reform and low levels of public awareness and engagement is slowing the implementation of constitutional provisions in chapter six of the constitution.  

In the UK, mySociety is helping constituents track how responsive their MP is on WriteToThem, a tool that allows users to quickly look up who represents them and send those representatives a message. Here, mySociety ranks MPs based on how responsive they were to messages sent using the tool. Some MPs have responded only a handful of times while others have responded to all messages sent over WriteToThem.

Click here to read more.

This is part three of a three-part series. You can view the first part with a brief introduction at this link, and part two here.

Experimenting with new technologies to engage citizens in Poland

In March of this year, the Polish organization Fundacja ePaństwo re-launched their popular parliamentary monitoring platform Sejmometr as mojePaństwo, or “My Country.” Like Parliament Watch and Congreso Visible, a desire to continue to broaden the organization’s reach to everyday people in Poland has pushed ePaństwo to experiment with entirely new strategies.

The alpha version of mojePaństwo was recently launched to replace Sejmometr.

The process to redesign the platform started two years ago, when the organization realized that although they had been widely successful in creating a site that engages citizens with information about what is happening in their parliament, traffic to the site had stagnated after two years at about 150,000 people per month. Traditional methods to improve the site—search engine optimization, simplistic designs, traditional media partnerships—weren’t working. At the time, ePaństwo chief operations officer Jakub Górnicki penned an article at The Huffington Post asking if gamification might be the answer to getting more citizens interested, which is the route they eventually took.

Click here to read more.

A recent survey on parliamentary data openness in Central and Eastern Europe shows that national parliaments in the region especially lack transparency of committees’ sessions. Transcripts of sessions, voting records or even sessions’ agenda are unavailable in many countries. The survey clusters the countries into two groups, with Czech Republic, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia and Slovakia being moderately open and Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo being much more closed.

Some time ago, I presented results of a global survey on voting data availability by KohoVolit.eu, a Czech and Slovak parliamentary monitoring organization (PMO). Recently, there has been another development in parliamentary data openness monitoring. NDI’s Western Balkan Legislative Strengthening Initiative conducted a comprehensive survey of nine Central and Eastern European parliaments. It is unique in many ways, mainly because the survey questionnaire was filled by parliamentary researches and not by PMOs, as it is usually the case.

The survey was based on the Declaration of Parliamentary Openness and focused on opportunities of citizens’ participation in the legislative process and parliamentary data openness. This section of the questionnaire contains questions on whether 48 types of parliamentary data are available on the official parliamentary website. It does not ask any further details (e.g. how many years of data are available or in what formats) and some questions could be more specific (e.g. whether voting records are available by name of individual MPs) but it draws a good rough picture of parliamentary openness in the region.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Europe, a recent ruling granted further access to the legislative process of the Council of the European Union. The decision is available in all EU languages here. The case was brought by Access Info Europe.

In Poland, Sejmometr published an analysis of the Polish Parliament’s progress towards openness, using the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness as a basis for analysis. 

In India, PRS Legislative Research published an article on the successes and failures of youth Members of Parliament. The Sunlight Foundation discusses the eighth anniversary of the Right to Information Act and implications for political finance transparency.

In Colombia, Transparencia por Colombia offered tips for understanding accountability efforts in the country, while Congreso Visible assessed efforts to bring equality for women to the legislature in the wake of a 2011 commission to improve gender equality.

In South Africa, the Right2Know campaign urged the South African parliament to redraft a bill on transparency to ensure accountable democracy, and offered a number of recommendations. The bill was recently returned to Parliament by the President amid a number of concerns.

Click here to read more.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could freely access all the relevant parliamentary information in the country we live in? Even better, wouldn’t it be great if we could easily compare and analyze all parliamentary information in the region we live in? It would allow us to learn about good practices in the region and would give us an excellent benchmark for our progress and achievements in our civic efforts aimed at opening up the parliaments. Such complex information would be a great tool that could aid in decision making in our civic activities, and would provide the evidence for our parliamentary advocacy initiatives.

Currently, no application in the region can provide us with such information - all our apps experience a language barrier when communicating with systems in other countries. Like people, apps need a language to communicate. Creating an API (application programming interface) standard would allow many apps in the region to communicate in the same language. Apps would be able to access information in other countries, and to use that information to make benchmarks and analysis. This way, we could make systematic and correct comparisons of the situation in various countries and use best practice examples to influence openness of the parliaments in our own countries.

Click here to read more.

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.