News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Germany, the Open Knowledge Festival took place in Berlin from July 15-17. A good summary of the event can be viewed here. Members of the OpeningParliament.org community that attended include Foundation ePaństwo, DATA Uruguay, Sunlight Foundation, Fundar, Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, KohoVolit, K-Monitor, Holder de Ord, Hvem Stemmer Hvad, Open Ministry, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, Open State Foundation, Open North, OpenKratio, Hasadna, mySociety, and Access Info.

Elsewhere, Parliament Watch recently announced an online survey that documents the positions of Germany’s 96 MEPs on important policy issues. In addition to the survey, the organization also collected voting behavior of the elected officials during the last parliamentary term.

In Greece, the Ministry of Administrative Reform and E-Government submitted the country’s Action Plan to the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The plan contains ambitious commitments on parliamentary openness and legislative transparency, including the introduction of a system for tracking bill changes, improvements in the usability and functionality of the parliament’s website, provision of historical parliamentary documents, and enhancements of social media policy.

In Ireland, the government launched data.gov.ie, an open data portal that currently supports 419 datasets. The Minister of Public Education and Reform announced the end of application fees for FOI requests. And the government approved the country’s Action Plan for OGP which includes several components to increase citizen participation during the pre-legislative process through consultation with committees and scrutiny of draft bills.

In France, Regards Citoyens initiated a crowdsourcing project that converted declarations of interests for all 925 MPs into open data. The declarations were previously scanned into PDFs by the High Authority on Transparency in Public Life (HATVP). The conversion of these files to open data brings the declarations into line with standards established in October 2013 by France’s law on the transparency of public life.

In Italy, OpenPolis and others have been drawing attention to the country’s need for an FOI law with the #FOIA4Italy campaign. Despite the growing momentum around FOI in recent years, there has been a lack of progress on the issue in parliament. FOIA4Italy plans to submit an FOIA bill based on legislation in countries with advanced access to information laws after crowdsourcing improvements from the Italian public.

In Tunisia, Al Bawsala unveiled a new project, Marsad Baladia, a platform that will monitor the activities of municipalities to generate greater citizen awareness before municipal elections scheduled for 2015. The project has already created a transparency index from the 24 municipalities it has so far observed.

Click here to read more.

This blog was cross-posted from the Sunlight Foundation’s blog.

As we wrote a week ago, the DATA Act was eventually signed by President Obama on a quiet Friday evening. Though we would have expected a bit more fanfare, Sunlight is thrilled to see the new legislation finally being enshrined, as it is supposed to bring a great level of transparency and accountability to federal spending information by ensuring that agencies use a common set of data standards and putting accurate, timely information online for public consumption.

We have long supported the goals of the DATA Act and already wrote a lot about the impact of the law on the US federal and local level. This time, we took a look at where it stands in the global context — are there any similar developments from other governments?

Because of the differences in the legal context and the difficulties in tracking actual implementation, such developments are almost impossible to compare. However, here’s what we found: There have already been a few very inspiring innovations in the field of financial openness, but most of these are not necessarily enshrined in one single law.

Brazil is an exception and a long-time pioneer in the field. As a result of passing the Law of Fiscal Responsibility, federal government agencies of the largest Latin American country have been required to publish all of their financial data online in machine-readable formats and on a daily basis through the country’s Transparency Portal since as early as 2004. The website contains vast amountof detailed and up-to-date information on government revenues and expenditures, procurement processes, federal transfers to municipalities, states and individuals.

Brazil’s financial transparency portal, http://www.portaltransparencia.gov.br/

Even more importantly, though, information is easy to search on the portal: Transparency International reports that budget lines have both the official and popular names of the initiatives, and as a result, the website is widely used by the media, government officials and citizens. Reports using data from the website led into investigations on the alleged misuse of public funds and ultimately to the resignation of a minister. Civil society also used information to create nice visualizations on how taxpayers’ money is spent in Brazil.

Click here to read more.

Issues of legislative openness and citizen engagement were highlighted at the European and Asia Pacific regional meetings of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) last week, as NDI and partners in the Chilean Congress organized sessions of the Legislative Openness Working Group.

At the Asia Pacific regional conference in Bali (May 6-7), an event hosted by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel of high-level officials from government, parliament and civil society. The panel delved into the challenges that parliaments face in engaging citizens who often have a declining trust in government.

New Zealand Internal Affairs Minister Peter Dunne described his government’s use of technology to respond to citizens’ increasing expectations, saying, “Not only are people much more willing to engage using the Internet, they expect to transact and engage via the Internet.” Dunne said that nearly 60 percent of New Zealanders report using government services online, a win-win. “This shift in the use of technology gives governments the ability to reach a wider audience for lower cost.”

Panelists address the audience in a LOWG session at the OGP Asia Pacific regional conference in Indonesia.

New Zealand also has ascribed this strategy to the legislative branch. It was the first country to attempt to crowdsource citizen input into legislation, creating an online “wiki” to collect citizens’ ideas on the 2008 Policing Act. The Parliament continues to allow online citizen submissions around draft bills under consideration as part of its recently launched beta.govt.nz website, which also provides a plethora of information about parliamentary activity.

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.

Organization: Team POPONG

Project: Pokr - Politics in Korea

Country: South Korea

Government Level: National

Overview: Pokr (pronounced pōker) – short for “Politics in Korea”  – was designed and developed by Team POPONG, a non-profit organization from South Korea. Team POPONG’s goal with Pokr is to organize Korean political information and make it universally accessible and useful. The website allows users to search for any official or candidate; proposed bill; political party or administrative region in South Korea.

Background: Team POPONG (POPONG: Public Open POlitical engineeriNG) is a Korean nonprofit, nonpartisan group founded in 2010 that aims to make politics easy and fun via technology. They value political neutrality, process automation and reproducibility, open source and open data.

The team initially created a platform called Korean Political Dictionary that compared candidates standing for election in the National Assembly.  At the time, there was very limited amount of information available on public candidates. POPONG began to find this data and, with the use of APIs, organized the information within a single source. This project turned into Pokr when the team decided to also provide information on bills and the inter-election season in which they were proposed.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Venezuela, Transparencia Venezuela outlined various civil rights in response to the worsening human rights situation in Venezuela. Earlier in February, the group joined with Forum for Life and other Venezuelan organizations to issue a statement condemning the increasing violence, arbitrary detention, and spread of misinformation by the government.

The European Parliament recently called on the government of Venezuela to disarm pro-government militant groups targeting ongoing protests with impunity. In a joint resolution, the Parliament called for the dispatch of a European-led monitoring group to Venezuela and for the Maduro government to withdraw arrest warrants issued for opposition leaders.

In the Ukraine, CHESNO suggested five criteria for the composition of a new cabinet of ministers and other management authorities in Ukraine. The President of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly (who has previously blogged on OpeningParliament) stated that the Assembly should play a strong role in direct talks between Ukraine and Russia.

Meanwhile, OPORA reported that documents taken from the Party of Regions headquarters in Chernivtsi may reveal violations of the 2012 electoral law, including the improper use of administrative resources by the Party, indirect vote-buying, using indirect Party representatives to obtain a majority in the election commissions, and the improper handling and storage of personal data lists.

In Afghanistan, the Free and Fair Election Forum (FEFA) released its first election observation report, which analyzes the security and electoral environment and reports violations observed so far in the run up to the April 5 presidential election.

In Mexico, Senator Laura Rojas spoke during Transparency Week in Mexico in support of further efforts to open government, which she said would address public concern with closed door negotiations on appointments, lack of budget transparency, confusion about allocation of resources for parliamentary travel, and many other issues. During Transparency Week activities, Senate President Raul Cervantes announced the creation of a joint commission to recommend actions to increase the transparency of Mexico’s government.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In the Netherlands, more than 400 municipalities will go to the polls on March 19. Research conducted by Open State, in collaboration with students from the University of Utrecht, recently concluded that information about local council voting records remains difficult to find or nonexistent for most municipalities across the country.  

In the United States, the Governance Lab at New York University announced the formation of a Research Network on Opening Governance, which will seek to develop blueprints for more effective and legitimate democratic institutions. The project was made possible through a three year grant of $5 million, from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as well as a gift from Google.org.

Elsewhere In the United States, GovTrack.us released comprehensive report cards on a range of subjects, including government transparency, for Members of Congress for 2013. In February, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) completed its efforts to provide House of Representatives bill summaries in XML format for bulk data download. While GPO already makes available House bills, the Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, and other documents from the executive branch in XML, the new feature will increase the availability of objective descriptions of complex legislative text, and is thus an important step in the House Leadership’s goal of increasing transparency.  

In Venezuela, Transparency Venezuela launched a report on the activities of the National Assembly in 2013, focusing in particular on the committees of Finance and Comptroller. Transparency also released a report in January on the latest developments in the Petrocaribe Energy Cooperation Agreement, detailing issues with Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  

In South Africa,  the Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) published an article about shrinking the accountability deficit created by a system where voters cannot directly call on individual public representatives on the basis that their votes put them there. The article highlighted a recent CSO initiative, the People’s Assembly website, to facilitate public participation. The website provides critical information in an easily understandable format to members of the public.

Click here to read more.