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.

This post was authored by Alisha Green.

Open meetings laws are an essential element of open government. Ensuring public access to government decision-making processes can help create transparency, allow for accountability, and encourage public participation in the choices being made on the public’s behalf.

For open meetings laws to live up to their full potential, they need to reflect the opportunities provided by recent advances in technology. Governments are already starting to update public records laws to take advantage of these kinds of advances, and open meetings laws are overduefor undergoing similar revisions.

Open meetings generate an abundance of public records, including agendas, minutes, votes, and more. Sharing these records online as open data is becoming increasingly easy and financially feasible. This opportunity is often missed by local governments, but that’s starting to change. States, counties, cities and towns across the country are finding ways to use open data to bolster open meetings, sharing information online about decision-making processes in easily accessible and reusable formats. Open data is helping in ways beyond making information more easily accessible, too. It’s also inviting the public to participate in the decision-making process in new ways – a key component of any open government initiative.

Recommendations for using open data to improve open meetings

Just as the public records process is being updated to take advantage of new technologies, it’s time for an overhaul of how governments approach open meetings. Some of the key principles of open data can be applied to broad improvements of open meetings policies. Here are some of the ways open data can be used to help bolster open meetings:

1. Post the open meetings law online

Open meetings laws are public accountability and access policies, and as such it makes sense to post these laws online where anyone can easily review their rights to access government. Posting these laws online also demonstrates that open meetings are part of the values, goals and mission of the government for keeping the public informed and engaged.

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.

This post was co-authored by Mor Rubinstein and Lindsay Ferris. 

There is a growing consensus in the international open government movement that more effective networking and better information sharing could strengthen the community and contribute to real political change. If the open government community can engage in more meaningful communication about the projects we are working on, the policies we are pushing for, and the tools we are using, we can better support advocates and activists in their push for greater political openness.

Several sessions have been organized at this year’s OKFest to address the issue of improved knowledge sharing and to find a way forward. We would like to bring two of these sessions to your attention – and encourage you to participate!

With participation from a diverse number of organizations, a two-part discussion is being organized to gather ideas on these important issues. These sessions are being co-organized by a diverse array of actors, including Open Knowledge, Sunlight Foundation, mySociety, KohoVolit.eu, ePantswo Foundation, World Bank, National Democratic Institute, and others. We have designed these sessions to gather feedback and solicit ideas from the international community; so, it seems appropriate to present these two discussions as a series of questions, rather than as a series of statements. The first session will address the following questions: Who are we? How does the international opengov community effectively map and connect the organizations and initiatives that make up the community? The second session will ask: How do we share knowledge? How can we use this knowledge to strengthen efforts to generate political change locally? We look forward to hearing your thoughts on how we can address each of these questions at OKFest.

The first session, Open Data Communities, will consider how to connect the global open government data community. Often, efforts to map the international community have been fraught with problems, namely outdated or incomplete lists, unstandardized information and limited funding. Following conversations at Transparency Camp (Sunlight Foundation’s annual opengov gathering), discussion sprang up about the possibility of creating a living platform that would provide an overview of the open government community and allow stakeholders to connect with other actors. Some work has been done towards this goal and we’re excited to share some of that with you in Berlin. Community buy-in and participation are critical to the success of this project and we need your help to make it work.  

The second session will consider how we can more effectively share knowledge, tools, and good practices to create political reform. At the national level, open government organizations or activities can sometimes be viewed as marginal actors, particularly when they operate in a narrow sector, such as parliamentary openness or open contracting. Yet, when multiple actors in this space coalesce, either internationally or domestically, across sectors on specific reform issues, the political leverage of this community can be strengthened. In this session, we will explore opportunities for improving collaboration in collecting open data sets relating to political information, sharing tools for analyzing and visualizing this data, and sharing knowledge and best practices — specifically with a view as to how more effective networking and knowledge sharing can drive openness reforms.

We are thrilled to have two one-hour sessions to discuss these issues. At a minimum, we hope that these sessions will generate energy and excitement about what the opengov community can achieve if we more effectively share information. We encourage you to participate and look forward to seeing you in Berlin!

Law is Code!

Over the last few years, a number of people have explored the idea of inverting Lawrence Lessig’s metaphor “code is law”, looking at the evolution of laws through the lens of coding tools. The parliamentary process is indeed so similar to a collaborative software development workflow that it is only natural to try and use a version control tool such as git to track individual legislative changes.

The analogy between both processes is deep: in each case, there is a group of people collaborating on a textual artifact (bill or program source code), proposing changes (amendments or patches), adopting or rejecting them (through votes or pull requests), and iterating until a stable, public version is made available (by promulgation or release). This new paradigm to think about legislation paves the way for new, innovative approaches of law-tracking. Some exciting work has already been made, most notably in Germany: the BundesGit project invites citizens to propose their own legal modifications as “pull requests”, and Gregor Aisch produced an unprecedented visualization of modifications to one law over 40 years of amendments.

Click here to read more.

This post is by Daniel Schuman, Policy Director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. 

Earlier today, the House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee made a major move towards improving public access to legislative information. In layman’s terms, the committee said that by the beginning of the next Congress information about the disposition of bills—where they are in the legislative process and who authored or co-sponsored the legislation—will be published in a way that computers can easily process, and thus can be easily reused by apps and websites.

Americans access legislative information through third-party sites. This change in publication policy will help guarantee that accurate, timely, and complete legislative information is directly available from the official source. Congress already publishes the text of legislation in a structured format that is downloadable in bulk.

The committee specifically directed the Clerk of the House to work with the Librarian of Congress and the Public Printer to publish bill status information for bulk data downloads by the beginning of the next congress. This has been a long-standing request of the public interest community and was the subject of a recent letter sent by CREW and GovTrack.us on behalf of the newly formed Congressional Data Coalition.

The report language came at the behest of Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL), who recommended the committee adopt this language in its report. His recommendation was the culmination of many years of hard work by legislative transparency advocates in both parties, including (but not limited to) Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), Minority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), and Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Mike Quigley (D-IL), Mike Honda (D-CA), and Ander Crenshaw (R-FL).

In June 2012, Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader Cantor, and then-Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Ander Crenshaw issued a letter on the occasion of the establishment of a Legislative Bulk Data Task Force charged with looking into improved public access to legislative information, stating “our goal is to provide bulk access to legislative information the American people without further delay.” Rep. Issa had offered an amendment to put that requirement into law, but withdrew it pending the report of the Task Force. In its December 2013 report, the Task Force recommended "that it be a priority for Legislative Branch agencies to publish legislative information in XML and provide bulk access to that data.“ While the issue was not raised during the recent Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee hearings, Ranking Member Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL) singled out Rep. Quigley at the full committee hearing for making the recommendation.

With the report language in the final committee report, it is unclear what additional action, if any, is necessary to put it into effect. The House Appropriations Committee has tremendous sway over legislative branch agencies, who may spring to comply even in the absence of floor action in the House. The Senate, in its own committee report, may not address the issue (thus perhaps giving tacit approval) or may expressly agree or disagree to bulk publication of bill status information. Indeed, the Senate’s Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee is still reviewing its appropriation bill, having met just yesterday.

Regardless, today’s action in the House is a significant win for transparency. Public interest advocateshave been fighting for bulk access to legislative information at least since May 2007, and the House has now put its full weight on the side of legislative transparency.

Here is the report language:

The Committee request that the Clerk of the House, the Librarian of Congress and the Public Printer work together to make available to the public through Congress.gov or FDsys bulk data downloads of bill status by the beginning of the next Congress.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Major developments in international relations from 1946 can be beautifully visualized thanks to voting records from the General Assembly of the United Nations. Let’s explore this unique dataset and see what we can learn from it.

Some time ago, I introduced a number of analytic and visualization tools that help to gain substantial knowledge from parliamentary data. These include diagrams of the legislative process, network analysis of bill sponsors and spatial modeling of voting records.

The latter technique appears to be the most popular. I even posted an offer of a free visualization in exchange for voting data to which several parliamentary monitoring organizations (e.g. Israeli, Polish, etc.) have responded.

The method can be applied to parliament-like bodies where individual entities are not elected representatives but institutions, for example, nations. In this post, I would like to demonstrate analytical power of this approach, using some 5,000 votes taken in the UN General Assembly votes in 1946-2012 and compiled by Erik Voeten.

Click here to read more.