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.

Some time ago, I surveyed all national parliaments in the world to see whether they record and publish results of plenary voting. In this post, I look at how exactly parliamentary voting data is provided. I also collected information about as much parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) as I could find and to see whether and how they help open voting data up.

My sample includes 283 legislative chambers from 200 jurisdictions, mostly UN member states and some other territories (e.g. Taiwan, Hong Kong). There are two nation states included that no longer exist but voting results from their parliaments are still around: Czechslovakia (1991-1992) and the Fourth French Republic (1946-1958).

A chart below shows that knowing how your MPs decide is sadly still relatively rare worldwide. Only 90 legislative chambers publish at least some voting results. Moreover, many of these chambers publish results of very few votes. For example, about 20 votes per year are recorded in German Bundestaag while the number is well over 2,000 in the Czech Chamber of Deputies where every vote is taken as a roll call by default. Transparency of voting is generally lower in Africa and Asia and among non-democratic countries. But even in some old democracies, almost no voting data exist (e.g. in Austria, France, New Zealand or the Netherlands).

Click here to read more.

• Hemos examinado si los grupos parlamentarios publican agendas de sus diputados
• Los grupos se reúnen con lobbies, grupos de presión, empresas y sociedad civil
• Solo UPyD publica los encuentros fuera de la actividad “oficial” parlamentaria, como con BlaBlaCar, Cairn Energy o Greenpeace
• El PP publica entrevistas y alguna asistencia a actos y el PSOE la actividad parlamentaria

Conocer el día a día al completo de los 350 diputados y diputadas puede ser una misión casi imposible en la actualidad, ya que la gran mayoría de los parlamentarios no cuenta con una agenda pública,pero sí existen algunas excepciones, tanto de diputados como de grupos parlamentarios.

Reunión de UPyD con la Federación de Organizaciones en favor de Personas con Discapacidad Intelectual. Imagen: FEAPS/Flickr

En este post nos centramos en las agendas de los grupos, más sencillas de localizar que las individuales, ya que de los siete grupos que hay en el Congreso, cuatro tienen página web (PSOE, CiU, UPyD y PNV) y el PP tiene una cuenta de Facebook bastante activa.

En los casos de los grupos de del Grupo Mixto y de Izquierda Plural, al estar formados por tantos partidos, no tienen una web conjunta. Sin embargo, en este último caso cuentan con una web de apoyo, Once diputados, que resume su actividad parlamentaria en un boletín.

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In India, national elections closed on May 16, with Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party anticipated to win more than the 272 seats required for a parliamentary majority. In advance of the election, Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS) developed report cards for members of the Lok Sabha. The report cards provide citizens with information gathered through the Right To Information Act and other government websites and assess MP performance on factors like attendance and efforts to introduce new development within their districts. See here for more information on SNS’ methodology.

Last month, PRS Legislative Research provided a historical comparison of the number of bills passed to ordinances declared during each Lok Sabha since 1952.

In Chile, delegates from 27 countries gathered in Santiago on April 29-30 for the first Poplus Conference, organized by mySociety and Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente. Participants shared goals for the future of the Poplus network, a nascent project with the goal to create and share open source code that helps civic organizations around the world.

In the European Union, voting for European Parliamentary elections will take place May 22-25. Election results will be available in open data format, allowing interested users to retrieve raw data, use filters to present the information in custom ways, and publish it on their own online platforms.

In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Kohovolit.eu launched an election calculator for the European Parliament that allows users to browse voting data of European MPs from 2009 to 2014. The calculator allows users to curate the data by selecting issues important to them and reviewing how closely the voting records of different EMPs match their views.

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.

Thanks to Ariana Tuckey for assistance in drafting this post.

Around the world, parliaments, governments, civil society organizations, and even individual parliamentarians, are taking measures to make the legislative process more participatory. Some are creating their own tools – often open source, which allows others to use these tools as well – that enable citizens to markup legislation or share ideas on targeted subjects. Others are purchasing and implementing tools developed by private companies to good effect. In several instances, these initiatives are being conducted through collaboration between public institutions and civil society, while many compliment online and offline experiences to help ensure that a broader population of citizens is reached.

The list below provides examples of some of the more prominent efforts to engage citizens in the legislative process.

Brazil

Implementer: Brazilian Chamber of Deputies
Tool: e-Democracia platform

Description: The e-Democracia platform offers simple web 2.0 tools to allow citizens to interact with lawmakers on specific issues, helping to connect Brazilian citizens to national lawmakers across thousands of miles of geography. Citizens can use the portal and social media platforms to engage Congressmen, mark-up legislation, and propose and debate solutions to policy problems. The platform has facilitated cross-country dialogue among disparate groups and has thousands of active users. It has also improved legislative transparency.

Website: http://edemocracia.camara.gov.br/
Additional Information: OpeningParliament.org Case Study

Click here to read more.

News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Taiwan, the folks at the PMO g0v.tw have a neat version tracking tool for amendments to existing legislation. An example is here.  

In Ghana, the Africa Freedom of Information Centre and Ghana Right to Information Coalition have praised the government for demonstrating resolve to deepen transparency and good governance as a means of improving the living conditions of Ghanaians by tabling in Parliament the Right to Information Bill.

In Japan, the Guardian reports that officials who leak ‘special state secrets’ and journalists who seek to obtain them could face prison if the proposed state secrets law is passed.

In South Africa, the Right2Know organization continued to mobilize against a Secrecy Bill which was recently passed by the parliament. OKF South Africa covered new efforts to increase transparency on the city of Cape Town’s by-laws.

Click here to read more.