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Rally behind Open Parliaments during Global Legislative Openness Week, Sept. 15-25

Posted August 7, 2014 at 1:57pm by swelshopengov

Does your legislature have an action plan for opening up its information and processes to the public? Are legislators making real progress toward their openness goals, in partnership with civil society? 

This September, you can use #OpenParl2014 to build (or regain) momentum around legislative openness and share your successes and challenges with counterparts around the world. The Open Government Partnership (OGP)’s Legislative Openness Working Group has announced that it will be launching the first-ever Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW) from September 15-25, to leverage a number of events coinciding with one another. These include:

  • Sept. 15: International Day of Democracy
  • Sept. 15-16: Legislative Openness Working Group regional meeting in Podgorica, Montenegro (hosted by the Parliament of Montenegro)
  • Sept. 24-25: Legislative Openness Working Group annual meeting in Valparaiso, Chile (hosted by the Congress of Chile)
  • Sept. 24: Open Government Partnership High Level Event at the margins of the UN General Assembly, New York
  • Sept. 25: ParlAmericas Plenary Assembly in Santiago, Chile

In addition, members of the OpeningParliament.org community in Brazil, Jordan, Mexico, Poland, South Korea, Finland, Australia, Honduras, Canada, Ghana and elsewhere have expressed interest in organizing or participating in openness events such as hackathons and exhibitions. The goal of GLOW is to encourage global collaboration, in the spirit of the Open Government Partnership, toward greater commitments to legislative openness by governments and parliaments:

Through Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW), the Legislative Openness Working Group’s co-chairs are pleased to offer event organizers access to shared branding and outreach materials, in order to promote peer-to-peer learning and collaboration among these various events. GLOW will provide transparency leaders worldwide with an opportunity to collaborate, share best practices and make progress toward adopting and implementing legislative openness commitments.

To get involved or learn more, visit the GLOW website. Or read more on the OGP blog.

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Open Parliamentary Data → Social Change: Example from the Czech Republic

Posted August 7, 2014 at 1:35pm by kamilopblog

Parliamentary monitoring organizations are generally very good at gathering, opening and republishing parliamentary data. Stories about actual social change that can be directly linked to their work are, however, much more rare. This makes a recent development in the Czech Republic all the more interesting.

Every vote taken during plenary sessions in the Czech parliament is by default recorded by names of individual MPs. Voting results are published in real time on the parliamentary website and the lower chamber also provides open voting data. This creates ample opportunities to do research on voting patterns but also allows KohoVolit.eu, a local parliamentary monitoring organization to track MPs attendance.

Results consistently show that MPs with the lowest attendance are almost invariably those that also hold top offices in the national or local government. For example, the chart below visualizes attendance rates of Czech members of the lower chamber since the last parliamentary elections in October 2013. Members of the cabinet (in red) are almost all among the MPs with low attendance rates.

In 2013, KohoVolit.eu tracked an MP with the lowest overall attendance that also managed to simultaneously hold over 30 offices (!). It turned out that some 50 % of his absences in parliament can be explained by him being at an event related to his extra-parliamentary offices (including e.g. christening a new fire truck or opening a vine festival).

Understandably, quite a large media attention to this issue accumulated over time. This has led to some MPs reducing the number of offices they hold (including the MP mentioned above). But most importantly, the Social Democrats (the strongest government party) recently (August 2014) announced results of an inter-party referendum where over 90 % of its voting members endorsed the party to propose a bill that would prevent MPs to hold multiple offices at the same time.

If this bill is indeed approved it will be among the cases where open parliamentary data clearly led to a positive social change and possibly an example for other parliamentary monitoring organizations to follow.

Kamil Gregor is a data analyst with KohoVolit.eu and Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.

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What opening parliamentary information can tell us about our parliaments (Vol. 4)

Posted April 8, 2013 at 8:13am by andrewmandelbaum

In the first volume of this series, we saw how open data and sharing enabled one individual to bring to life political scientists’ complex information about legislative voting records.

Working with the same method of voting pattern analysis that Randall Munroe used in his datavisualization of partisanship and ideology in the U.S. Congress, Kohovolit has developed their own ways of helping citizens understand voting patterns – only for an entirely different set (really, sets) of legislators.

Click here to read more.

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