News from the OpeningParliament.org community:

In Ukraine, Chesno has had a busy month. In early September, Speaker of the Parliament Rybak pledged more transparency and openness in parliamentary proceedings during a civil society meeting led by Chesno. Then, Chesno called on the parliament to pass access to information legislation, highlighted the failure of one-third of MPs to file parliamentary inquiries, reported on the barring of journalists from committee meetings, and examined so-called “independent” MPs. Chesno also released a new series of studies on MPs who vote outside of party lines. This high level of activity came even as one of their employees was assaulted.

Also in Ukraine, Transparency International Ukraine called on the parliament to pass bill 0947, which would increase access to information, as well as a potential anti-corruption bill.

In Switzerland, Politnetz.ch developed a new webpage to publicize data around parliamentary voting, in addition to a new survey for the German national elections in partnership with the national broadcasting network. Politnetz.ch, along with local partners, has also expanded its parliamentary monitoring to cantonal parliaments, including St. Gallen and Basel-Stadt. The organization recently won a Grimme Online Award and called for e-voting. OpenData.ch covered efforts by the Swiss government to increase the availability of government data.

Click here to read more.

Some housekeeping items: 

1. Comment on the Declaration has officially closed (although that’s not to say we’re no longer listening to your input), and we will begin preparing it for publication and release on September 15 at the World e-Parliaments Conference in Rome. We hope to have this process completed within about one week so that we can make the final document available for translation into multiple languages (if you are interested in translating, please let us know). Keep checking this email list and OpeningParliament.org for more information as that process moves forward.
2. We have started to post the logos and websites of participating organizations at OpeningParliament.org/Organizations. If you don’t see your organization there, send me an email with your logo!
3. In just the past week, I’ve learned about organizations doing parliamentary monitoring work in Ukraine, Bulgaria and Benin. We’ll be working to get these organizations involved in this network, and I just wanted to encourage everyone who reads these emails to notify us if you know of other organizations doing this type of work around the world that might not be on our radar.

Onto some news:

In Mexico, an editorial appeared in La Silla Rota, a well-known online publication, about the efforts of this PMO network to draft the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. It explains the importance of an international Declaration in the context of Mexico’s parliament, citing gaps in Mexico’s adherence to the provisions in the document and calling for more openness. The article also mentions OpeningParliament.org and the recent conference in Paris. (English translation)

A newly formed PMO in Ukraine, Chesno (“honest”), launched a new website to monitor deputies in the Ukrainian Parliament. The tool reports on MPs attendance records, income declarations, votes, political promises, and corruption. Check out articles on the new website in TechPresident and the Kyiv Post.

Click here to read more.

Just a few interesting news items to share that I’ve come across in the past week. If there have been any happenings in your own countries or if you want to share any recent work, please feel free to reply. Thanks to Maria for sharing some news from Latin America, and to Eric for an update on the great new Scout tool from the Sunlight Foundation.

In Hong Kong, SynergyNet released their report on the Governance Performance of the HKSAR Government 2012, a press release and the report are available here.

In Hungary, the government has expressed an intention to join the Open Government Partnership (OGP) after a long campaign by numerous NGOs. The PMO K-Monitor has released a set of recommendations for the government to become more open, detailed in this post on their blog.

India and the US launched a bilateral effort to utilize a new Open Government Platform. This open source software includes a data management system, web site, and social networking community support. More information is available on the project’s website at http://www.opengovplatform.org/.

Zambia: Constitution coalition asks government to publicise budget (Post Zambia)

Click here to read more.