Latin American legislatures have significant work to do to meet international standards on openness and transparency.  This is evident from the latest findings of the Latin American Index for Legislative Transparency, unveiled between 15-25 September during Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW) in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. The average country score was below 40 percent. While Peru (55%) and Chile (53%) lead the index, Argentina (36%) ranks in seventh place, followed by Bolivia (24%) and Venezuela (21%).

What does the Index measure?

The Index comprises four dimensions: (i) Legal regulations; (ii) Parliamentary work; (iii) Budget and Administrative Management; and (iv) Mechanisms for Participation, Public Engagement and Accountability.

Click here to read more.

In July, the Organization of American States (OAS) convened an Inter-American Meeting of Presidents of Legislative Powers at the National Congress of Peru. The event brought together parliamentary leadership from more than 25 countries in the Americas, and highlighted issues of parliamentary openness and accountability as a major topic of discussion.

The meeting culminated in the endorsement of the Lima Declaration (view it in English or Spanish), which ratified the recommendations of two working tables at the event, including one entitled, Transparency and Accountability in the Role of Parliament: Are there any Open Parliaments?

This working table, one of two highlighted during the event, agreed to a number of principles including the promotion of greater civil society engagement in the legislative process, initiatives for civic education, and the integration of new technologies. Among its specific agreements, it endorsed the civil society-authored Declaration on Parliamentary Openness as a fundamental standard for legislative openness.

Parliamentary leadership from more than 25 countries convene in the Congress of Peru.

The working table also recognized the work of the Open Government Partnership’s Legislative Openness Working Group (OGP-LOWG) as well as additional key international standards documents like the Santiago Declaration on Transparency and Integrity in Parliaments and Political Parties. (View all of the working table’s agreements in English and Spanish.)

In addition to the working tables, conference participants also had the chance to hear from experts on parliamentary openness and citizen engagement, including Senator Hernán Larraín, representing the Chilean Congress as co-chair of the OGP-LOWG; Cristiano Ferri, director of the e-Democracy project and HackerLab at the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil; and others including Senator Pío García-Escudero Márquez, president of the Senate of Spain.

Read more information on the conference on the OAS’s website.

This post was collaboratively written by Jogi Poikola and Markus Laine of Open Knowledge Finland, James McKinney of Open North, and Scott Hubli, Jared Ford, and Greg Brown of National Democratic Institute.  

At this year’s Open Knowledge Festival – a biennial gathering of open government advocates – there was considerable interest in moving toward greater standardization of APIs (application programming interface) relating to government decision-making processes. Web APIs help promote an open architecture for sharing content and data between communities and applications. Standardization of APIs for government decision-making data would allow tools built by civic innovators or governments to analyze or visualize data about government decision-making to be used across multiple jurisdictions, without needing to re-program the tool to accommodate differing data formats or ways of accessing the data.   

Most government decision-making procedures involve similar processes (meetings, requests for public comment, etc.), decision-points (committee hearings, committee meetings, plenary sessions, etc.) and supporting documentation (agendas, draft legislation, information on voting records, etc.). Standardizing the ways that these types of information are structured allows tools for visualizing data about open government decision-making to be used across jurisdictions, as well as facilitating comparison of data and information.  

To discuss the state of play with respect to open government decision-making APIs, Open Knowledge Finland, Open North, and the National Democratic Institute organized a session at the Open Knowledge Festival 2014 in Berlin to explore the possibilities for moving toward a global standard for APIs that deal with data on government decision-making.

Click here to read more.

In almost two years since the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness was drafted, many parliamentary monitoring organizations have realized its strength as a guideline for benchmarking openness of parliamentary data in various national parliaments and some of them have developed methodologies of capturing it. There are already comparative studies ranking selected parliaments according to their adherence to at least some articles of the Declaration.

The most prominent examples include a comparative study covering several Latin American congresses by the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency that actually precedes the Declaration. Data availability of the Turkish and several Balkan parliaments was surveyed by a Serbian parliamentary monitoring organization Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability. Eastern European parliaments were also covered by a survey of the National Democratic Institute. And last but not least, a more tech-oriented methodology of data openness monitoring was developed by the Sunlight Foundation and applied to rank the US state legislatures.

Until today, however, there has been no attempt to measure parliamentary data openness on lower levels of government. At the same time, anecdotal evidence from all over the world seems to suggest that various regional and municipal parliaments and representative assemblies tend to be far less open than national parliaments.

KohoVolit.eu, a Czech and Slovak parliamentary monitoring organization, has recently published a brand new methodology of measuring parliamentary data openness based on the Declaration and applied it to the 14 Regional Assemblies in the Czech Republic. The Czech Regions operate on the second level of government. Their population varies between 300,000 and 1,200,000 in a country of some 10 million and their combined annual budgets correspond to about 12 % of total public sector expenditures. The capital of Prague is one of the Regions.

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.

A recent survey on parliamentary data openness in Central and Eastern Europe shows that national parliaments in the region especially lack transparency of committees’ sessions. Transcripts of sessions, voting records or even sessions’ agenda are unavailable in many countries. The survey clusters the countries into two groups, with Czech Republic, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia and Slovakia being moderately open and Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo being much more closed.

Some time ago, I presented results of a global survey on voting data availability by KohoVolit.eu, a Czech and Slovak parliamentary monitoring organization (PMO). Recently, there has been another development in parliamentary data openness monitoring. NDI’s Western Balkan Legislative Strengthening Initiative conducted a comprehensive survey of nine Central and Eastern European parliaments. It is unique in many ways, mainly because the survey questionnaire was filled by parliamentary researches and not by PMOs, as it is usually the case.

The survey was based on the Declaration of Parliamentary Openness and focused on opportunities of citizens’ participation in the legislative process and parliamentary data openness. This section of the questionnaire contains questions on whether 48 types of parliamentary data are available on the official parliamentary website. It does not ask any further details (e.g. how many years of data are available or in what formats) and some questions could be more specific (e.g. whether voting records are available by name of individual MPs) but it draws a good rough picture of parliamentary openness in the region.

Click here to read more.

The information in this list was compiled by Andrew Mandelbaum with the assistance of Ariana Tuckey.

Parliaments are increasingly seeking to enable citizens to reuse, mix and republish parliamentary information, recognizing the potential of ordinary citizens to harness technology to explore and analyze data in innovative ways. A primary concern for parliaments and citizens alike is the way parliamentary information is licensed and whether or not it conforms with open data principles, such as those captured in the open definition, the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, or the 10 Principles for Opening Up Government Information. These documents encourage parliaments to publish information in machine­readable formats and to allow for citizen reuse and republication by default (recognizing that exceptions may exist in discrete and narrowly defined cases).

While many parliaments are adopting ‘open licenses’ in order to meet the open standard, others are simply placing information in the public domain. The list below describes the licensing standards that select parliaments are using to allow citizens to reuse and republish parliamentary information.

Australia

Chamber: Parliament of Australia
Website: http://www.aph.gov.au/Help/Disclaimer_Privacy_Copyright
License: Creative Commons BY­NC­ND 3.0
License Wording: Available here.

Click here to read more.