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OpenParl News Brief: May 20, 2015

Posted May 20, 2015 at 8:01am by jorgeflorezh

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Montenegro, the Center for Democratic Transitions (CDT) was selected as one of the four winners of the UNDP competition “Technology for Citizen Engagement.” The award provides small grants to support ideas for using technology to expand opportunities for citizen engagement. CDT’s  winning idea was Ask for Data, a tool that will allow citizens to easily request information from public institutions.

In Kenya, Muslims for Human Rights released a video raising awareness about the right to know how MPs are spending constituency development funds. The constituency development fund, which is intended to support development projects in MPs’ constituencies, lacks meaningful oversight.

In Greece, Vouliwatch recently released its first annual report, highlighting the role of digital technology in allowing citizens to follow parliamentary issues, ask questions to MPs, and to share ideas and proposals. The organization also announced that it will begin to provide information about the activities, discussions, and decisions of the European Parliament related to Greece and other key policy issues.

In Pakistan, Pakistan Institute for Legislative Development and Transparency (PILDAT) released two scorecards measuring the quality of governance at the federal and provincial levels of government.   

In Chile, Chile Transparente released a report on the transparency of political parties. The report concludes that although there was overall improvement compared to previous years, political parties still have weak programmatic and financial transparency.

In Georgia, Jumpstart Georgia’s Gender Pay Game was selected as a finalist for the Data Journalism Awards 2015. Winners will be announced during the Data Journalism Awards Ceremony at the General Editors Network Summit in Barcelona on June 18.

In Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, and Nigeria, Open Knowledge and Code for Africa announced the 2015 cohort of Open Government Fellows. The new fellows will promote increased government transparency and improved dialogue between citizens and governments.

In Europe, more than 100 groups issued a letter to urge the European Commission to make the lobby register legally binding. The letter also calls on the Commission to ban meetings with unregistered lobbyists and to allocate appropriate resources for monitoring and enforcement of this rule.

In Kuwait, Kuwait Transparency Society celebrated its 10th Anniversary.

In Mexico, the Senate, in cooperation with the National Democratic Institute, hosted a three day workshop on Promoting Legislative Transparency. The training covered several tools and methodologies to improve civil society’s capacity to use data to monitor parliamentary activities.  

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PMO News Update: Vol. 18

Posted January 11, 2013 at 5:18am by danswislow

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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PMO News Update: Vol. 13

Posted October 17, 2012 at 10:35am by danswislow

Here’s some news from the last two weeks:

In Ireland, the PMO KildareStreet, which has been without data since September 18 because of the Irish Parliament (Houses of the Oireachtas) ceasing to publish XML data, has started a fundraising campaign to raise money to support a redevelopment of their website that will allow them to independently scrape parliamentary data. Click here to support KildareStreet’s resurrection.

In Africa, a regional network of PMOs met for the first time in Accra, Ghana, in September after first coming together at the PMO conference in Washington in April/May. One participant, the Institute for Empirical Research in Political Economy in Beninwrote a short post about the event. The conference was led by the Ghana Center for Democratic Development and allowed for discussions on the formal creation of an African network, creating a study that maps existing PMOs in Sub Saharan Africa, and the use of the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. Participants from KenyaUganda and Malawi, among others, were also involved. (It’d be great to hear a report from any members here who attended!)

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