As always, please feel free to send updates through the OpeningParliament.org contact page for inclusion in the News Brief.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

Globally, the OGP’s Legislative Openness Working Group organized GLOW, or Global Legislative Openness Week. GLOW consisted of events and activities focused on transparent, participatory legislative processes organized by members of the parliamentary openness community in 30 countries. Further details about event outcomes can be found on the blog.

The voting period for Making All Voices Count’s Global Innovation Competition began October 22 and concludes November 23. The competition includes 241 ideas, many of which were submitted by members of the OP community. The public is encouraged to review these ideas and vote for those they believe will most effectively empower citizens and secure more accountable, open governance in the program’s 12 key countries.

In Latin America, the LALT Network released their 2014 Index of Legislative Transparency, with detailed analysis on the congresses of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, México, Perú, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

In Mexico, the Open Parliament Alliance launched as a collaboration between Congress, the Federal Institute for Access to Information and Data Protection (IFAI), and a coalition of civil society groups with the purpose of ensuring that Mexico’s 32 state legislatures and national congress comply with principles of parliamentary openness.

Mexico also hosted AbreLatam and Con Datos, two important events organized around open government, legislative transparency, and citizen participation. A short Spanish language summary of the conversations that took place at these events can be found here.

In Portugal, the parliament passed a resolution supporting the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness with near identical language to the Declaration itself. The resolution progressed through the entire legislative process, from committee to plenary, before ultimately being passed on July 10.

Click here to read more.

An international consensus on standards for democratic parliaments has only recently begun to emerge over the last decade. As one component of these standards, the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness provides a useful framework for both CSOs and parliaments to assess legislative information management practices and other aspects of legislative openness. While members of parliament (MPs) who adopt resolutions to support the Declaration’s principles take the important step of shifting their parliament towards a culture of openness, citizens are able to utilize the Declaration to raise awareness and advocate for greater transparency on specific issues.

There are several recent examples of parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) using the Declaration’s principles as benchmarks to evaluate their respective parliaments. This strategy benefits from the legitimacy that an internationally endorsed set of standards lends to national advocacy efforts. Moreover, with every new analysis that’s framed using the Declaration, PMOs increase the growing body of comparative information available on parliamentary transparency and encourage others to undertake further analyses.

In Portugal, the PMO Transparência Hackday is the latest to provide an analysis of a national parliament using principles from the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness as benchmarks. Transparência’s research looks at the Declaration’s 44 principles in light of Portugal’s parliamentary practices, records whether each principle is complied with or not, and provides additional explanation and links to where this information can be found.

Transparencia Hackday analyzes the Portuguese Parliament based on the provisions of the Declaration.

The simplicity and reproducibility of this analysis are notable. The resulting series of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses to the availability of specific information quickly draws attention to those aspects of information access where parliaments can improve and areas where they are succeeding and may offer positive examples to other parliaments. This approach also benefits from its objective frame: the resulting analysis is like a series of check marks, the accuracy of which can be maintained by crowdsourcing additional information (for instance, Transparência Hackday welcomes others to provide feedback on their analysis directly on their wiki).

Click here to read more.

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.

Click here to read more.

News in parliamentary monitoring:

In Liberia, Declaration supporter NAYMOTE began launching a series of report cards for legislators. The report cards, which rate MPs on the deliverables provided to their constituencies during the past legislative session, received local media attention in MPs’ districts. (Also check out this guest post from NAYMOTE on the OpeningParliament blog.)

OpeningParliament partners in the United States from the Sunlight Foundation and GovTrack.us (and others) made ‘scraping’ tools for legislative data available on Github, open source. Check out this article from O'Reilly Media which includes an interview with Eric Mill from Sunlight, who assisted in developing the tools.

In Spain, the Senate released an update of their official website at a cost of about €500,000, with about half of that going to pay for licenses for proprietary code. In response, open source activists recreated the Senate’s website at a tiny fraction of the cost, using open source code. Read about this effective demonstration of the economic savings of using open source software here.

Click here to read more.

I know many of you may be eager to hear more news about the conference that took place in Paris last weekend. Many members from the PMO community participated in the event, including several on the PMO Network email list, so I hope that maybe we can get a conversation going about any important outcomes of the event. You can view the full program from the conference, videos from Friday morning’s plenary, and uploads of (nearly) all of the conference presentations. Thanks to Benjamin from Regards Citoyens for providing this information, and to everyone from Regards Citoyens and Sciences Po for putting on an awesome event. From my perspective, a couple things are particularly worth highlighting:

Click here to read more.