Open Parliaments, the World Over
The Open Government movement that has been groundbreaking in getting governments to open up their vast data sets on the delivery of services, is seeing a new frontier: Parliaments. Opening Parliament, a project led by NDI, the Sunlight Foundation, and the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency released its groundbreaking Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, a set of principles that has been signed by more than 80 organizations that are monitoring parliaments. Parliaments and their data on bills, amendments, and proceedings are on of the big frontiers for open government advocates that are now beginning to see traction of their work to open up legislative bodies the world over.
We took a look at some of the exemplary parliamentary monitoring organizations and how they are presenting parliamentary information to get a sense of the state of affairs in parliamentary openness. While we have a long way to go to present legislative data in compelling ways that tell effective stories about key issues, legislation, and legislative processes, there are some interesting examples of groups all over the world that are worth highlighting.
Newpublik.nl from the Netherlands features a great timeline of media coverage of specific bills, mixing different data sets to create context to legislative data that gives a viewer a sense of how a specific bill fits into the current social context. Adding additional, contextual data such as news coverage makes parliamentary data far more useful. See for instance this dossier.
The French site, Nosdeputes.fr provides information on specific comments on legislation as well as a timeline of legislators' speaking and asking questions as an indicator of their participation in the legislative process.
Similarly, They Work for You in the UK, one of the older parliamentary oversight efforts, also provides information about a legislator's activities. See for instance, this MP's profile.
Sejmometr.pl in Poland provides actual video footage / of legislators and debates as well as information about their attendance and how many times parliamentarians voted. It would be great to have meta data for the footage provides
Congreso Visible is a gorgeous site that provides almost a replay of the legislative process with timelines of legislation, links to media websites, legislator profiles, and annotated commentary. It's also a very pretty site. See for instance an overview of bill currently debated: http://www.congresovisible.org/proyectos-de-ley/
Similarly, in Chile, there is Vota Intelligente, a less-easily navigable site but one that also provides lots of information on parliamentary activity in the country, including pending bills and legislator profiles.
In the US, Popvox has been around for a while now and while more geared to allowing a constituent or interest group to find, and then take action on legislation of interest, it also provides an overview of current bills before Congress, among other things.
We also like Scout, a new project of the Sunlight Foundation, that alerts you when a bill of interest to you is brought up before Congress.
My Society, one of the pioneers in the field of 'keeping track of your legislators' contains a number of transparency and good governance resources, where users can check the status of repairs to their streets, file petitions online, and help freedom of information acts. My Society is also actively engaged in porting its tools to other countries than just the UK.
As the parliamentary openness movement increases, especially in countries where parliamentary transparency is not yet the norm, there will be undoubtedly many more interesting ways to present and visualize parliamentary data to put legislation and legislative activity into context on issue that critically matter to citizens. If you know of other sites, leave a comment!