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.

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In order to promote openness and transparency, an international conference “Forum - Citizens, Media, Parliament” was held on December 5, 2013 in Belgrade, Serbia. The forum was organized together, for the very first time, by the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA), within the Open Parliament Initiative, and the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia.

What was our motive to organize such an event? Well, the goal of the Forum was to try to find the answers to the key question facing modern democracies. How can we bring citizens and members of parliament closer to one another? Also, we wanted to come to conclusions about the role of each actor in the democratic process – including MPs, parliamentary staff, CSOs representatives and journalists. That’s why the official slogan of the Forum was “Transparency builds trust”.

MPs and parliamentary staff, along with the media, and civil society organizations from Serbia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Montenegro participated in three thematic panel discussions on “Parliament and CSOs,” “Parliament and Media,” and “Parliament and New Technology.” The forum’s participants were also addressed by the British Parliament’s Lord Speaker of the House of Lords, Baroness Frances D'Souza, who spoke about the importance of transparency in government by video link.

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Last November, Dan Swislow wrote a post about how PMOs and parliaments are collaborating to help parliaments become, more open, accountable and engaging of citizens, and more effective institutions in the process. This issue came up in a recent discussion in the PMO Google Group, when José Félix Ontañón, a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) Spain and co-founder of OpenKratio asked for some cases and experiences on collaboration agreements between PMOs and Parliaments.

We have aggregated and followed up on some of the examples people provided. Here are some of the great initiatives discussed and a couple of others:

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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.

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Due to my work in Mexico (which you should see another update on very soon), this post has been long delayed. And because of that, it’s also just plain long – you might need a few sittings to get through this one. Thanks to NDI project assistant Greg Brown for his help putting this together:

News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

During an OpeningParliament Google Hangout, Markus Schmidt discussed his study of the performance of the German, Swiss and Austrian parliaments against the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. During the session, German PMOs began planning to conduct joint advocacy using the study and the Declaration to create a workplan that Bundestag staffers can follow to open parliamentary data.

In Mexico last week, it was announced that the government had signed a nearly $10 million contract to create an app to release legislative information. In response, Codeando México launched #App115, a contest to build the app for free through open source tools, offering a prize of just $1,000. After the outcry, the Mexican Congress canceled the expensive contract and organizations who lined up to support #App115, like Fundar, have been invited to present its results to the Congress’ Science and Technology Commission at the beginning of next month.

In the U.S., the Sunlight Foundation published its Open Legislative Data Report Card, an analysis of the openness of data in all 50 U.S. states. The report card analyzes states based on the completeness, timeliness, and permanence of government data along with ease of access and machine readability. Sunlight, a core partner in OpeningParliament.org, has recently expanded its focus to rededicate itself to international efforts.

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News from the parliamentary monitoring community:

In Croatia, a new freedom of information law has been adopted. The law outlines the types of information that must be made public and calls for proactive publishing of this data by government agencies and bodies. GONG, a Croatian parliamentary monitoring organization, provided input and amendments to the law during its drafting, which were adopted.

In Botswana, the Botswana Speaks Parliamentary Initiative was recently launched with the help of Gov2u and other partners. The initiative, similar to the USpeak platform in Uganda, intends to improve governance and bring more voices into the policy-making discussion by connecting MPs directly with citizens through SMS messaging.

In Mexico, Fundar continues to work with MPs who are interested in redesigning the parliament’s website in order to make it more responsive to citizens. MPs cite the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency’s index and the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness as guides for this work. MPs held a Legislative Dialogues for a Digital Mexico meeting with activists, civil society organizations, and scholars calling for the creation of a new federal agency that would address a growing digital divide, work towards universal access to information, and drive Mexico’s broad digital agenda.

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Otvoreni Parlament (Open Parliament) is a joint initiative of five Serbian civil society organizations, including the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA), launched to increase the transparency of the Serbian parliament, inform the public about the parliament’s work, and the establish regular communication between citizens and MPs.

For the first time in Serbia, citizens have the opportunity to directly communicate with their MPs. Within its parliamentary monitoring and advocacy initiative, Otvoreni Parlament (Open Parliament), CRTA recently launched an online communication tool “Ask Your MP” that allows direct public communication between citizens and MPs. Although not as advanced as Parliament Watch from Germany, this tool provides a unique opportunity for citizens in Serbia to ask direct questions and demand accountability from their representatives. Citizens’ interest in engaging with their representatives was shown on the very same day of the launch, when over one hundred questions were sent to MPs and more than one thousand users visited the Open Parliament website within only five hours.

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