Parliamentary informatics is the application of information technology to the documentation of legislative activity. The principal areas of concern are the provision, in a form conveniently readable to humans or machines, of information and statistics about:
* individual legislators
* particular legislative proposals
* votes thereon
* text of legislation
Parliamentary informatics is carried on both by officials of legislatures and by private for-profit and non-profit actors, with motivations ranging from the administration of parliaments to lobbying and facilitating democratic discourse.
The division of activities between official and unofficial activity differs widely between polities, even within a single country. There exists substantial overlap with disciplines such as
psephology
Psephology (; from Greek el, ψῆφος, psephos, pebble, label=none) or political analysis is a branch of political science, the "quantitative analysis of elections and balloting". As such, psephology attempts to explain elections using the ...
and, as far as the text of successfully enacted legislation is concerned,
legal informatics
Legal informatics is an area within information science.
The American Library Association defines informatics as "the study of the structure and properties of information, as well as the application of technology to the organization, storage, ret ...
in general.
The use of parliamentary informatics is also a rapidly growing trend in parliamentary monitoring. In a September 2011, joint report from the
National Democratic Institute
The National Democratic Institute (NDI), or National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, is a non-profit American NGO that works with partners in developing countries to increase the effectiveness of democratic institutions. The NDI's ...
and
World Bank Institute The World Bank Institute is the capacity building branch of the World Bank. It provides learning programs, policy advice and technical assistance to policy makers, government and non-government agencies, and development practitioners of developing c ...
, a survey of parliamentary monitoring organisations (PMOs) found that parliamentary informatics are used by approximately 40 percent of PMOs worldwide. The report states, "These tools can automatically aggregate and organize information from parliamentary websites and other information sources, generate visualizations (such as political finance maps), and create new platforms for citizens to interact with MPs or participate in parliamentary monitoring and policy analysis."
Issues
Access to parliamentary information is the most significant issue in parliamentary informatics; access may be inhibited technologically through the provision of parliamentary information in a form not amenable to processing by machines, or legally, by copyright or other protection of the parliamentary record.
Ultimately, it may be possible to provide citizens with a comprehensive overview of all the legislation going through parliaments everywhere in the world, which would allow the tracking of the implementation of international treaties and of general legislative trends.
In a September 2011 report from the
National Democratic Institute
The National Democratic Institute (NDI), or National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, is a non-profit American NGO that works with partners in developing countries to increase the effectiveness of democratic institutions. The NDI's ...
and
World Bank Institute The World Bank Institute is the capacity building branch of the World Bank. It provides learning programs, policy advice and technical assistance to policy makers, government and non-government agencies, and development practitioners of developing c ...
on parliamentary monitoring organisations, open data is cited as a fundamental issue for further development. The report explains, "While they have proven effective in many instances, the most useful informatics tools require the availability of parliamentary data in machine-readable or "open data" formats, which remains a challenge in many contexts."
Around the world
International
:
see details at Akoma Ntoso
Akoma Ntoso (''A''rchitecture for ''K''nowledge-''O''riented ''M''anagement of ''A''frican ''N''ormative ''T''exts using ''O''pen ''S''tandards and ''O''ntologies) is an international technical standard for representing executive, legislative and ...
Akoma Ntoso (Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of African Normative Texts using Open Standards and Ontologies) is an initiative of the
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs
The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) is part of the United Nations Secretariat and is responsible for the follow-up to major United Nations Summits and Conferences, as well as services to the United Nations Econ ...
(UNDESA) that proposes an XML document schema providing sophisticated description possibilities for several Parliamentary document types (including bills, acts and parliamentary records, etc.). The work will provide the basis for the
OASIS
In ecology, an oasis (; ) is a fertile area of a desert or semi-desert environment'ksar''with its surrounding feeding source, the palm grove, within a relational and circulatory nomadic system.”
The location of oases has been of critical imp ...
Legal XML
Legal XML is a non-profit organization developing in the frame of the OASIS consortium open standards for legal documents, such as electronic court filing, court documents, legal citations, and transcripts, and related applications. The building bl ...
LegalDocumentML project.
Legal bodies such as the European Parliament, the European Commission, the EU Publication Office, the UK Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, the Italian Senate, the Parliament of Uruguay, the Library of Congress of Chile, the Official Journal of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the German federal executive bodies alongside the federal legislative journal as well as several agencies within the United Nations have initiated projects to digitalize their legislative systems by developing application profiles of the Akoma Ntoso (AKN) legislative document standard. The "United States Legislative Markup" (USLM) schema for the
United States Code
In the law of the United States, the Code of Laws of the United States of America (variously abbreviated to Code of Laws of the United States, United States Code, U.S. Code, U.S.C., or USC) is the official compilation and codification of the ...
(the US codified laws) was designed to be consistent with Akoma Ntoso. Akoma Ntoso was explicitly designed to be compliant with
CEN Metalex, one of the other de facto standards besides Akoma Ntoso, which is used in the
UK Statute Law Database
legislation.gov.uk, formerly known as the UK Statute Law Database, is the official web-accessible database of the statute law of the United Kingdom, hosted by The National Archives. It contains all primary legislation in force since 1267 and a ...
. The
United States Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...
created the Markup of US Legislation in Akoma Ntoso challenge in July 2013 to create representations of selected US bills using the most recent Akoma Ntoso standard within a couple months for a $5000 prize, and the Legislative XML Data Mapping challenge in September 2013 to produce a data map for US bill XML and UK bill XML to the most recent Akoma Ntoso schema within a couple months for a $10000 prize.
Albania
Une Votoj (in English, "I vote") is a website that provides information about the Parliament of
Albania
Albania ( ; sq, Shqipëri or ), or , also or . officially the Republic of Albania ( sq, Republika e Shqipërisë), is a country in Southeastern Europe. It is located on the Adriatic and Ionian Seas within the Mediterranean Sea and shares ...
. The site structures Parliamentary plenary and committee sessions and agendas, and summaries of the proceedings. It also provides biographical notes about elected members, attendance and voting records. It was established in 2005, and is presently run by
Mjaft!
MJAFT! () is a non governmental organisation in Albania that is partly funded by the U.S. government.
See also
* Erion Veliaj
* Elisa Spiropali
* Politics of Albania
* Color Revolution
References
{{commons category, MJAFT!
External links
Of ...
, an Albanian non-governmental civil society movement.
Australia
OpenAustralia.org is a community-funded site which was launched in June 2008 and automatically collects and publishes in an easy-to-read format the transcripts of all
Australian Government
The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government, is the national government of Australia, a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Like other Westminster-style systems of government, the Australian Government i ...
House of Representatives and Senate debates, questions, discussions and notices. OpenAustralia.org also made available the Register of Senators' and Members' Interests online for the first time ever in Australia. The site was developed in Australia by the
OpenAustralia Foundation
The OpenAustralia Foundation (OAF) is a non-profit organisation aimed at improving government transparency. Its projects include Right to Know, a website allowing users to submit freedom of information requests, and They Vote for You, a parliamenta ...
, adapted from the UK site
TheyWorkForYou
TheyWorkForYou is a parliamentary monitoring website operated by mySociety which aims to make it easier for UK citizens to understand what is going on in Westminster, as well as the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd and the Northern Ireland Assembl ...
built by
mySociety
mySociety is a UK-based registered charity, previously named UK Citizens Online Democracy. It began as a UK-focused organisation with the aim of making online democracy tools for UK citizens. However, those tools were open source, so that t ...
. The site allows comment and discussion against debates and allows users to track the level of participation of Member of the House in debates, including statistics on their appearances in the House – so citizens can keep track of their representatives and be fully informed and involved with their Member's performance in the House. Within weeks of being launched OpenAustralia attracted a lot of attention and positive feedback from both the public and government and is set to pave the way for closer working relationships between government and citizens.
Austria
The
National Council of Austria
The National Council (german: Nationalrat) is one of the two houses of the Austrian Parliament and is frequently referred to as the lower house. The Politics of Austria, constitution endows the National Council with far more power than the Federa ...
is covered by meinparlament.at. The website was modelled after a
German partner website.
Africa
"Africa i-Parliaments" is the portal of the regional initiatives of the
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs
The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) is part of the United Nations Secretariat and is responsible for the follow-up to major United Nations Summits and Conferences, as well as services to the United Nations Econ ...
(UNDESA) aimed at strengthening the role of African Parliaments in fostering democracy and good governance by developing common information services and tools, and building information management capabilities with the objective of making Parliaments i-nterconnected, i-nformed i-ndependent, or in short, i-Parliaments.
The project includes two main initiatives:
Akoma Ntoso (Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of African Normative Texts using Open Standards and Ontologies) proposes an XML document schema providing sophisticated description possibilities for several Parliamentary document types (including bills, acts and parliamentary records, etc.). It aims to standardise simple, technology-neutral representations of Parliamentary Documents to improve inter-Parliamentary co-operation and reduce the costs of Parliamentary IT support systems. Akoma Ntoso defines a set of recommendations and guidelines for e-Parliament services in a Pan-African context and provides an enabling framework for the effective exchange of machine readable Parliamentary Documents such as legislation, debate record, minutes, etc. The work will provide the basis for the
OASIS
In ecology, an oasis (; ) is a fertile area of a desert or semi-desert environment'ksar''with its surrounding feeding source, the palm grove, within a relational and circulatory nomadic system.”
The location of oases has been of critical imp ...
Legal XML
Legal XML is a non-profit organization developing in the frame of the OASIS consortium open standards for legal documents, such as electronic court filing, court documents, legal citations, and transcripts, and related applications. The building bl ...
LegalDocumentML project.
[
]
Brazil
Interlegis is an integration and modernisation program of the Brazilian parliaments (municipals, states and federation) in partnership between the Brazilian Federal Senate and Inter-American Development Bank. The main development of Interlelegis was the LexML Brasil image:Lexml portal.png, 300px, (search engine)
See also
* Akoma Ntoso
* Lex (URN)
* LexML
The LexML is a joint initiative of the Civil Law legal system countries seeking to establish open standards for the interchange, identification and s ...
standard and portal.
Congresso Aberto – Open Congress.
Canada
OpenParliament.ca is a volunteer-run website providing information about the voting record and speeches of MPs.
The City of Toronto makes legislative information including voting records at toronto.ca/council
Lipad.ca is the website of an academic collaboration at the University of Toronto that includes a searchable database of the written record of Parliamentary Debates since 1901.
Gnowit.com provides a platform that tracks the Canadian parliament, and political issues in global media in real-time.
Chile
Vota Inteligente Vote in an intelligent way.
Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional Library of Congress.
Czech Republic
KohoVolit.eu is a volunteer-run website providing a sample of votings both in the Lower and Upper Chamber of the Czech Parliament allowing the user to test her or his own preferences against the MPs.
Denmark
The Parliament website (Folketinget) has records of votes, speeches, laws, and written questions in plain form.
Hvem Stemmer Hvad has elaborate parliament voting statistics and tracks parliamentary questions and media mentions of politicians. The site offers access to its data through an API. The name translates to "Who Votes What".
Kend Dit Folketing has general statistics on speeches, voting patterns and legislative proposals.
European Parliament
www.votewatch.eu has collected and displays full records of the activities of the Members of the European Parliament starting with 2004. VoteWatch.eu is based on the expertise of academics from London School of Economics and Universite Libre de Bruxelles. The website displays full records of voting, attendance and other activities (parliamentary questions, speeches, reports etc.) of MEPs from all member states. Furthermore, it shows a set of statistics that provide detailed information on how the coalitions are forming between the various European Political Groups. VoteWatch.eu has been updated for the 2009–2014 parliamentary term and in early 2010 has also released a report on the voting behaviour in the newly elected Parliament.
The site ''It's Your Parliament'' contains voting records of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and makes it easy to compare voting records of individual MEPs and political groups. Users can comment on legislation, MEPs and cast their own votes. In March 2010 ''It's Your Parliament'' opened an API.
ParlTrack is closely monitoring the legislative process within the European Parliament. Among other things, it covers committee agendas, votes and tracking of dossiers via email and RSS. Parltrack is available as free software.
''Testbeeld Europa'' shows how the Dutch Members of the European Parliament voted. It is made by the nonpartisan, non-profit ''Instituut voor Publiek en Politiek'' (IPP).
IPP in Romania ran a full site monitoring MEPs. It shut down in December 2008.
Czech-Slovak KohoVolit.eu (in English, too) prepares calculators on match between user and political groups and parties in EP, and individual MEPs. It is available for the 2009– term.
''Follow the Money'' which aims to monitor the EU budget and runs the twin sites ''FarmSubsidy'' and FishSubsidy.
''at4am.eu'' is a mailing list dedicated to exchange knowledge between people working in the European Parliament and people who don't, on how to use the European Parliament's web-based amendment authoring tool at4am. The source code was made available in 2012 at at4am.org.
''ThinkingAboutEU'' gathers data from different sources and displays information about the members of the European Parliament, describing them by their most used keywords, categorizing their documents, analyzing their connections both online and offline (membership, social connections, collaborations). It's also possible to play "Match the MEP" a simple game to test the knowledge of the European Parliament.
Finland
Kansan Muisti ("the memory of the people"), follows the Finnish Parliament and investigates whether the MPs votes in accordance with the promises made in voter advice applications before the elections.
Parliament voting data is available as a RESTful API.
France
* Both the Senate and the National Assembly publish the bills in progress, the debates and the amendments on their website. They also publish most of their data as Open Data.
* Mon-Depute.fr was the first site to publish MP's voting rolls.
* An association of free software campaigners known as ''April'' has been gathering declarations from candidates standing for election about their opinion on the issue of free software, and providing an interface for voters to look up the results.
* Since 2006 ''Mémoire Politique'' has published a toolbox designed to help users reach members of French and European Parliaments, and track their voting records.
* On 14 September 2009, ''NosDeputes.fr'' was released. It tracks the activity of French Members of the Parliament (''Assemblée Nationale''). The software and data are released under open licences (GPL and CC-by-sa). It is hosted by ''Regards Citoyens''. In September 2011, ''NosSenateurs.fr'' was released as a similar project on the members of the second chamber of the French Parliament (''Sénat''). Regards Citoyens used the parliamentary data available through these projects for multiple studies : on MP's presence as well as on lobbying
* Since 2014, ''La Fabrique de la Loi'', another project hosted by Regards Citoyens, aims to make it easier to show how the laws are made.
* Since 2019
Datan
This website provides data about the voting behaviour of parliamentarians and political groups in the National Assembly. It computes some statistics about coalition formation between political groups, MPs' loyalty to their group, and MPs' voting proximity to the other groups.
Germany
The German federal parliament Deutscher Bundestag
The Bundestag (, "Federal Diet") is the German federal parliament. It is the only federal representative body that is directly elected by the German people. It is comparable to the United States House of Representatives or the House of Common ...
and eight state parliaments (Landtag
A Landtag (State Diet) is generally the legislative assembly or parliament of a federated state or other subnational self-governing entity in German-speaking nations. It is usually a unicameral assembly exercising legislative competence in non- ...
) (last update: January 2012) are covered by ''abgeordnetenwatch.de''. The website supports the transparency of MP's voting behaviour and MP's supplementary income. However, the main focus is on public Q&A. Citizens can ask questions, which can be answered by members of parliament.
Projects like ''Deutschland API'', ''Bundestagger'', ''Offenes Köln'' and ''Wahlversprechen.info'' are associated with the Open Data Network, a non-profit organisation of software developers and political activists to promote open access, open data, open government, transparency and participation in Germany.
''Offenes Parlament'' is a newer effort by the German chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation
Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data. It was founded by Rufus Pollock on 20 May 2004 in Cambridge, UK. It is incorporated in England an ...
, which allows citizens to search and subscribe to parliamentary documents and plenary transcripts. The organisation is also operating ''Frankfurt gestalten'', a local portal for the inhabitants of Frankfurt am Main.
The German Federal Ministry of the Interior started the project Elektronische Gesetzgebung ("Electronic Legislation") in 2015/2016 and published Version 1.0 of the German application profile "LegalDocML.de" in March 2020. The projects aim is to digitalize the entire legislative lifecycle from drafting to publication.
Georgia
The Georgian Parliament has information on MPs, and their voting records, and civilians have information about legislation.
Iran
The Majlis Research Center
The Research Center of Islamic legislative Assembly () is the research arm of the Iranian parliament (Majlis). This center works primarily and directly for members of the Iranian parliament, their committees and staff on a confidential, nonparti ...
provides an informative website that publishes information on legislative drafts and their texts, timings, specifications and related signatories, as well as approved laws, with a comprehensive search engine. Mobile Apps and RSS feed has also been provided to facilitate this usage. It also presents profiles of all members of Parliament, their bio, membership of committees, and list of signed bills and law proposals.
Ireland
KildareStreet.com (named for Kildare Street
Kildare Street () is a street in Dublin, Ireland.
Location
Kildare Street is close to the principal shopping area of Grafton Street and Dawson Street, to which it is joined by Molesworth Street. Trinity College lies at the north end of the ...
, where the Irish Parliament is located) is a volunteer-made site launched in April 2009 which collects and republishes the transcripts of debates in Dáil Éireann
Dáil Éireann ( , ; ) is the lower house, and principal chamber, of the Oireachtas (Irish legislature), which also includes the President of Ireland and Seanad Éireann (the upper house).Article 15.1.2º of the Constitution of Ireland read ...
and Seanad Éireann
Seanad Éireann (, ; "Senate of Ireland") is the upper house of the Oireachtas (the Irish legislature), which also comprises the President of Ireland and Dáil Éireann (the lower house).
It is commonly called the Seanad or Senate and its memb ...
, and parliamentary questions. It, like the Australian project OpenAustralia is partly derived from the code base of TheyWorkForYou
TheyWorkForYou is a parliamentary monitoring website operated by mySociety which aims to make it easier for UK citizens to understand what is going on in Westminster, as well as the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd and the Northern Ireland Assembl ...
in the UK. It intends to expand to cover members' expenses and register of interests in the futur
Israel
Open Knesset is an open-source, volunteer-run website tracking legislative processes, voting records and trends of the Israeli parliament (Knesset
The Knesset ( he, הַכְּנֶסֶת ; "gathering" or "assembly") is the unicameral legislature of Israel. As the supreme state body, the Knesset is sovereign and thus has complete control of the entirety of the Israeli government (with ...
).
Italy
openparlamento allows to track legislative progress, votes and Parliament members using official data from Italian Parliament. The platform lets users comment, vote and emend on every parliament act, supplies official legislative text and rss feeds. openparlamento is a non-partisan project realised by openpolis.
The source code is available on a Subversion repository at http://svn.openpolis.it/repos/openparlamento.
Japan
The of the National Diet Library
The is the national library of Japan and among the largest libraries in the world. It was established in 1948 for the purpose of assisting members of the in researching matters of public policy. The library is similar in purpose and scope to ...
lets users search for text and images related to National Diet
The is the national legislature of Japan. It is composed of a lower house, called the House of Representatives (Japan), House of Representatives (, ''Shūgiin''), and an upper house, the House of Councillors (Japan), House of Councillors (, ...
plenary sessions and committees.
Jordan
The Jordanian Parliament Monitor
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the m ...
is a website that provides information about the Parliament of Jordan
Jordan ( ar, الأردن; tr. ' ), officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,; tr. ' is a country in Western Asia. It is situated at the crossroads of Asia, Africa, and Europe, within the Levant region, on the East Bank of the Jordan Rive ...
. The site presents profiles of all members of Parliament, information about the MP's deeds and stances on public policy issues, bills and law proposals, questions to the Cabinet, interventions during plenary and committee sessions. The website also includes news about the various parties and blocs represented in Parliament, statistics about the Parliament and about MP's performance as well as the studies and reports published by the Monitor. It was established in 2009, and is run by Al-Quds Center for Political Studies
Jerusalem (; he, יְרוּשָׁלַיִם ; ar, القُدس ) (combining the Biblical and common usage Arabic names); grc, Ἱερουσαλήμ/Ἰεροσόλυμα, Hierousalḗm/Hierosóluma; hy, Երուսաղեմ, Erusałēm. i ...
, a Jordanian think-tank
A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture. Most think tanks are non-governmental org ...
based in Amman
Amman (; ar, عَمَّان, ' ; Ammonite language, Ammonite: 𐤓𐤁𐤕 𐤏𐤌𐤍 ''Rabat ʻAmān'') is the capital and largest city of Jordan, and the country's economic, political, and cultural center. With a population of 4,061,150 a ...
.
Kenya
mzalendo: Eye On Kenyan Parliament provides electronic information about the Kenyan parliament, which is otherwise only available offline.
Kosovo
KDI Kosovo provides electronic reports and voting records from Kosovo's parliament.
Latvia
GudrasGalvas.lv is a social networking website between the citizens and their elected parliamentary representatives and ministers.
Every visitor of the site (without registration) is free to view the profiles of MPs and ministers, read their pre-election promises, blogs, overview of their on-line and media "footprint", which is updated automatically. MPs and ministers can also add their blogs, start discussions as well as post other information at their will and convenience.
Having logged in, the visitors of the site (using their Twitter, Facebook etc. accounts) can ask questions, post their comments or replies, participate in discussions and use other interactive features of GudrasGalvas.lv
Gudras galvas – "smart heads", words often used in Latvia when referring to the Parliament as an institution or its individual members.
Lithuania
Atviras Seimas (Open Parliament) provides statistics for MP attendance, votes, speeches, rebellions, travel maps, popularity ratings based on internet search result counts. It is a volunteer-run website.
Mano Seimas (My Parliament) publishes voting records for interesting or controversial bills, provides MP's biography and allows to ask questions and receive answers from MPs. Part of the published data is fetched through API provided by Atviras Seimas. Mano Seimas is a part of e-democracy project run by Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University.
Manobalsas.lt (myvote) is a smart voting tool allowing users to take a test and find out which political party and candidate best matches their opinion. The site launched in 2008 before National parliament elections. More than 300 candidates registered on the site.
Malaysia
Citizen Think Tank This domain expired 24 May 2012—no useful information.
New Zealand
TheyWorkForYou.co.nz hosts a user friendly version of the NZ Parliament debate transcripts, and summarises activity by bill, by ministerial portfolio and by organisations making submissions to the Parliament. It also provides lists of how parties voted on bills in Parliament. It is a volunteer-run project.
CommoNZ provides lists of how MPs votes on non-party votes in Parliament (in New Zealand, many votes are formally conducted by the parties rather than the individuals, even in respect of MPs with constituencies).
Netherlands
POLITIX.nl tracks voting behaviour of Dutch political parties.
Stemmentracker was launched in the national elections in November 2006. For crucial votes the site provides an introduction to the vote and shows how parties voted. A voter can also vote, so the systems shows the parties that voted most like the user. Made by the nonpartisan, non-profit Instituut voor Publiek en Politiek (IPP). IPP looking for possibilities for keeping it up to date in the future.
Norway
Holder de ord is a volunteer-run, non-partisan organisation and open source website that monitors the Norwegian parliament. It provides voting records, a search engine for party promises, and analysis of which promises are kept or broken.
Poland
Sejmometr monitors the Polish parliament.
Mam Prawo Wiedzieć collects and presents information about Members of Polish Parliament (and Polish Members of the European Parliament).
Russia
In Russia, projects in the sphere of Government 2.0 are actively developing.
Government Web catalogue of all government bodies and official websites created by any government structure. It includes ratings of websites quality, special lists of government websites that violates Russian laws and so on.
Government People automatic aggregator of all Russian officials blogs. It includes ratings of persons, monitors activity by region and person competences and provides public API for reuse.
Project Duma 2.0 is a social initiative aimed to improve the laws and to find in Internet effective ways of solving problems. The aim of the project is not simply to inform officials about the citizens' decisions and initiatives, but lobbying of these ideas at the legislative level with the maximum of their application. Duma 2.0 – the first project in Russia, which was created in the global world trend called Citizen 2.0.
OpenGovData.ru – a non-profit project dedicated to the availability of information disclosed by the state for its citizens.
Romania
The Institutul pentru Politici Publice has created a web site with lots of structured data about the Romanian Parliament. Adrian Moraru, deputy director with IPP said in an interview with mySociety
mySociety is a UK-based registered charity, previously named UK Citizens Online Democracy. It began as a UK-focused organisation with the aim of making online democracy tools for UK citizens. However, those tools were open source, so that t ...
explains how they have had to obtain much of their Parliamentary data by court action. The site was first launched in 2006 and redesigned in 2010.
Median Research Centre launched Parlament Transparent in November 2014. This is a parliamentary monitoring tool focused on the Romanian Chamber of Deputies and organised around four dimensions: Members of the Chamber and their work, Public Policy domains, Parliamentary Party Groups (PPGs) and Data Export.
The application tracks the policy specialisation and the engagement in local interest representation of each MP and enables users to compare the activity of their representatives (one-to-one and one-to-all).
Moreover, Parlament Transparent allows specialised NGOs and ordinary citizens to keep track of the latest legislative developments in 15 policy areas. Other important features are automatically
tracking laws adopted without debate or vote and reporting all cases of party switching.
A qualitative feature of the application refers to presenting and explaining the most controversial bills and votes taken in the current legislative cycle.
South Africa
Parliamentary Monitoring Group hosts news, documents, speeches, statements and press releases from committees in the South African parliament.
United Kingdom
The situation in the United Kingdom is very active, with several of the major volunteer projects run by mySociety
mySociety is a UK-based registered charity, previously named UK Citizens Online Democracy. It began as a UK-focused organisation with the aim of making online democracy tools for UK citizens. However, those tools were open source, so that t ...
. The official UK Parliament website provides transcripts of the Parliamentary debates and votes in plain text form, and these are parsed by a project known as parlparse into a timeline of publicly available structured XML files. These files provide the data for TheyWorkForYou
TheyWorkForYou is a parliamentary monitoring website operated by mySociety which aims to make it easier for UK citizens to understand what is going on in Westminster, as well as the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd and the Northern Ireland Assembl ...
, which hosts the speeches in a user friendly form and creates email alerts and rss feeds, and Public Whip
The Public Whip is a parliamentary informatics project that analyses and publishes the voting history of MPs in the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
It was developed by Francis Irving and Julian Todd following the 18 March 2003 Parliamentary App ...
, which keeps track of the votes and allows for an expression of their meanings in plain English.
Independently of this, the academic Philip Cowley at Nottingham University
The University of Nottingham is a public university, public research university in Nottingham, United Kingdom. It was founded as University College Nottingham in 1881, and was granted a royal charter in 1948. The University of Nottingham belongs t ...
researches specifically into how MPs vote through his Revolts website and publications.
Commercial companies DeHavilland, Dods
Randall's Monitoring
and many traditional public affairs consultancies offer paid for parliamentary monitoring and wider research and intelligence services.
Sweden
Citizen Intelligence Agency displays data, metadata and charts for Swedish parliament and government.
United Nations
The website Undemocracy gives hyperlink
In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference to data that the user can follow or be guided by clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text wit ...
ed access to transcripts of the General Assembly
A general assembly or general meeting is a meeting of all the members of an organization or shareholders of a company.
Specific examples of general assembly include:
Churches
* General Assembly (presbyterian church), the highest court of presby ...
and Security Council
The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN) and is charged with ensuring international peace and security, recommending the admission of new UN members to the General Assembly, and ...
of the United Nations, with parsed voting records.
Several agencies within the United Nations have initiated projects to dig- italize their legislative systems by developing application profiles of the Akoma Ntoso
Akoma Ntoso (''A''rchitecture for ''K''nowledge-''O''riented ''M''anagement of ''A''frican ''N''ormative ''T''exts using ''O''pen ''S''tandards and ''O''ntologies) is an international technical standard for representing executive, legislative and ...
(AKN) legislative document standard.
United States
References
{{Reflist
Subfields of political science
Politics of the United Kingdom
Politics of Canada
Politics of New Zealand
Government in Canada