Parliamentary informatics
Encyclopedia
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:
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
and, as far as the text of successfully enacted legislation is concerned, legal informatics
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 and World Bank Institute
, a survey of parliamentary monitoring organizations (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."
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 and World Bank Institute
on parliamentary monitoring organizations, 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."
ed access to transcripts of the General Assembly and Security Council of the United Nations
, with parsed voting records.
. 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!
, an Albania
n non-governmental civil society movement.
group who also built TheyWorkForYou
from which OpenAustralia has been adapted. 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.
is covered by meinparlament.at. The website was modeled after a German partner website.
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 standardize simple, technology-neutral representations of Parliamentary Documents in order to improve inter-Parliamentary cooperation 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.
Bungeni – Parliamentary Information System is an end-to-end suite of applications that provides a world-leading solution for drafting, managing, consolidating and publishing legislative and other parliamentary documents. Bungeni aims to increase the efficiency of parliamentary activities and make Parliaments more open and accessible to citizens—virtually allowing them “inside the Parliament” or Bungeni, the Kiswahili word for “inside the Parliament”.
Congresso Aberto - Open Congress.
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".
Folkevalg lets users debate and vote on concrete parliamentary issues. The site is financially supported by the EU.
Folkets Ting is a volunteer-run website with the same data that also offers rss feeds and lets users comment on content. "Folkets Ting" means "Peoples Parliament" and is a pun on "Folketinget".
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. 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.
Parliament voting data is available as a RESTful API.
) (last update: November 2010) are covered by abgeordnetenwatch.de . The website supports the transparency of MP's voting behavior 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.
Newer projects like Deutschland API, Bundestagger, Frankfurt gestalten and Wahlversprechen.info are parts of the newly founded Open Data Network 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.
, 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
and Seanad Éireann
, and parliamentary questions. It, like the Australian project OpenAustralia is partly derived from the code base of TheyWorkForYou
in the UK. It intends to expand to cover members' expenses and register of interests in the future.http://handelaar.org/blog/2009/04/a-substantial-announcement
).
The source code is available on a Subversion repository at http://svn.openpolis.it/repos/openparlamento.
. 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 , a Jordanian think-tank based in Amman
.
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.
. The site presents profiles of all 128 Lebanese members of Parliament, information about the MP's deeds and stances on 50 public policy issues, bills and law proposals, questions to the Cabinet, interventions during plenary and committee sessions and law challenges submitted to the Lebanese Constitutional Council. The website also includes statistics about the Parliament and about MP's performance as well as the monthly newsletters of the Monitor, summarizing the parliamentary activities. The Monitor organizes regular public hearings gathering citizens and one or two MPs from a certain district, to debate the MPs' commitment to voicing the concerns of aspirations of their constituents. It was established in 2006, and is run by Nahwa al-Muwatiniya(Towards Citizenship), a Beirut
-based non-governmental civil society organization.
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.
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).
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.
Mam Prawo Wiedzieć collects and presents information about Members of Polish Parliament (and Polish Members of the European Parliament).
Most active participants in this area are:
Government Web catalog 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.
explains how they have had to obtain much of their Parliamentary data by court action.
The site was first lunched in 2006 and redesigned in 2010.
. 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
, which hosts the speeches in a user friendly form and creates email alerts and rss feeds, and Public Whip
, 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 researches specifically into how MPs vote through his Revolts website and publications.
Commercial companies Dods, DeHavilland, Political Wizard and Randall's offer paid for parliamentary monitoring.
- 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
Psephology is that branch of political science which deals with the study and scientific analysis of elections. Psephology uses historical precinct voting data, public opinion polls, campaign finance information and similar statistical data. The term was coined in the United Kingdom in 1952 by...
and, as far as the text of successfully enacted legislation is concerned, legal informatics
Legal informatics
Legal informatics is an area within information science. One of the best definitions of legal informatics comes from Erdelez and O’Hare :Legal informatics could be said then, to encompass several conceptual areas:...
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 and World Bank Institute
World Bank Institute
The World Bank Institute is the capacity development 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 countries...
, a survey of parliamentary monitoring organizations (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 and World Bank Institute
World Bank Institute
The World Bank Institute is the capacity development 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 countries...
on parliamentary monitoring organizations, 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."
United Nations
The website Undemocracy gives hyperlinkHyperlink
In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks...
ed access to transcripts of the General Assembly and Security Council of the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
, with parsed voting records.
Albania
Une Votoj (in English, "I vote") is a website that provides information about the Parliament of AlbaniaAlbania
Albania , officially known as the Republic of Albania , is a country in Southeastern Europe, in the Balkans region. It is bordered by Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, the Republic of Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south and southeast. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea...
. 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!
MJAFT! is a non governmental organisation in Albania that aims to raise awareness of the many political and social problems facing Albania. MJAFT! grew out of a grassroots effort by students and other volunteers. The organisation is partly funded by the U.S...
, an Albania
Albania
Albania , officially known as the Republic of Albania , is a country in Southeastern Europe, in the Balkans region. It is bordered by Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, the Republic of Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south and southeast. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea...
n 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 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 with the assistance of the UK-based mySocietyMySociety
mySociety is an e-democracy project of the UK-based registered charity named UK Citizens Online Democracy, that aims to build "socially focussed tools with offline impacts". It was founded by Tom Steinberg in September 2003, and started activity after receiving a £250,000 grant in September 2004...
group who also built TheyWorkForYou
TheyWorkForYou
TheyWorkForYou is a website run by mySociety, a project of registered charity UK Citizens Online Democracy, and is a tool for political campaigners and those interested in the Parliamentary activities of UK MPs, Lords, and Northern Ireland MLAs....
from which OpenAustralia has been adapted. 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 AustriaNational Council of Austria
The National Council is one of the two houses of the Austrian parliament. According to the constitution, the National Council and the complementary Federal Council are peers...
is covered by meinparlament.at. The website was modeled 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 (UN/DESA) 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 standardize simple, technology-neutral representations of Parliamentary Documents in order to improve inter-Parliamentary cooperation 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.
Bungeni – Parliamentary Information System is an end-to-end suite of applications that provides a world-leading solution for drafting, managing, consolidating and publishing legislative and other parliamentary documents. Bungeni aims to increase the efficiency of parliamentary activities and make Parliaments more open and accessible to citizens—virtually allowing them “inside the Parliament” or Bungeni, the Kiswahili word for “inside the Parliament”.
Brazil
Vota Na Web - Votes on the web.Congresso Aberto - Open Congress.
Canada
How'd They Vote? is a volunteer-run website providing information about the voting record and speeches of MPs, as is OpenParliament.ca.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".
Folkevalg lets users debate and vote on concrete parliamentary issues. The site is financially supported by the EU.
Folkets Ting is a volunteer-run website with the same data that also offers rss feeds and lets users comment on content. "Folkets Ting" means "Peoples Parliament" and is a pun on "Folketinget".
European Parliament
www.votewatch.eu http://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 expertize 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 27 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 behavior 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. 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.
Finland
Kansan Muisti ("the memory of the people"), follows the Finish 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
- 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
- Mon-Depute.fr was the first site to publish MP's voting rolls.
Germany
The German federal parliament Deutscher Bundestag and four state parliaments (LandtagLandtag
A Landtag is a representative assembly or parliament in German-speaking countries with some legislative authority.- Name :...
) (last update: November 2010) are covered by abgeordnetenwatch.de . The website supports the transparency of MP's voting behavior 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.
Newer projects like Deutschland API, Bundestagger, Frankfurt gestalten and Wahlversprechen.info are parts of the newly founded Open Data Network 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.
Georgia
Georgian Parliament has information on MPs, and their voting records. Civilin has information about legislation. My Parliament aggregates it all together.Ireland
KildareStreet.com (named for Kildare StreetKildare Street
Kildare Street is a well-known street in Dublin, the capital city of Ireland close to the principal shopping area of Grafton Street and Dawson Street, to which it is joined by Molesworth Street. Some Irish government departments have their offices on this street but it is most famous for Leinster...
, 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
Dáil Éireann is the lower house, but principal chamber, of the Oireachtas , which also includes the President of Ireland and Seanad Éireann . It is directly elected at least once in every five years under the system of proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote...
and Seanad Éireann
Seanad Éireann
Seanad Éireann is the upper house of the Oireachtas , which also comprises the President of Ireland and Dáil Éireann . It is commonly called the Seanad or Senate and its members Senators or Seanadóirí . Unlike Dáil Éireann, it is not directly elected but consists of a mixture of members chosen by...
, and parliamentary questions. It, like the Australian project OpenAustralia is partly derived from the code base of TheyWorkForYou
TheyWorkForYou
TheyWorkForYou is a website run by mySociety, a project of registered charity UK Citizens Online Democracy, and is a tool for political campaigners and those interested in the Parliamentary activities of UK MPs, Lords, and Northern Ireland MLAs....
in the UK. It intends to expand to cover members' expenses and register of interests in the future.http://handelaar.org/blog/2009/04/a-substantial-announcement
Israel
Open Knesset is an open-source, volunteer-run website tracking legislative processes, voting records and trends of the Israeli parliament (KnessetKnesset
The Knesset is the unicameral legislature of Israel, located in Givat Ram, Jerusalem.-Role in Israeli Government :The legislative branch of the Israeli government, the Knesset passes all laws, elects the President and Prime Minister , approves the cabinet, and supervises the work of the government...
).
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.
Jordan
The Jordanian Parliament Monitor is a website that provides information about the Parliament of JordanJordan
Jordan , officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan , Al-Mamlaka al-Urduniyya al-Hashemiyya) is a kingdom on the East Bank of the River Jordan. The country borders Saudi Arabia to the east and south-east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north and the West Bank and Israel to the west, sharing...
. 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 , a Jordanian think-tank based in Amman
Amman
Amman is the capital of Jordan. It is the country's political, cultural and commercial centre and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. The Greater Amman area has a population of 2,842,629 as of 2010. The population of Amman is expected to jump from 2.8 million to almost...
.
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.
Lebanon
http://www.lpmonitor.org (the Lebanese Parliamentary Monitor) is a website that provides information about the Parliament of LebanonLebanon
Lebanon , officially the Republic of LebanonRepublic of Lebanon is the most common term used by Lebanese government agencies. The term Lebanese Republic, a literal translation of the official Arabic and French names that is not used in today's world. Arabic is the most common language spoken among...
. The site presents profiles of all 128 Lebanese members of Parliament, information about the MP's deeds and stances on 50 public policy issues, bills and law proposals, questions to the Cabinet, interventions during plenary and committee sessions and law challenges submitted to the Lebanese Constitutional Council. The website also includes statistics about the Parliament and about MP's performance as well as the monthly newsletters of the Monitor, summarizing the parliamentary activities. The Monitor organizes regular public hearings gathering citizens and one or two MPs from a certain district, to debate the MPs' commitment to voicing the concerns of aspirations of their constituents. It was established in 2006, and is run by Nahwa al-Muwatiniya(Towards Citizenship), a Beirut
Beirut
Beirut is the capital and largest city of Lebanon, with a population ranging from 1 million to more than 2 million . Located on a peninsula at the midpoint of Lebanon's Mediterranean coastline, it serves as the country's largest and main seaport, and also forms the Beirut Metropolitan...
-based non-governmental civil society organization.
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.
New Zealand
TheyWorkForYou.co.nz hosts a user friendly version of the NZ Parliament debate transcripts, and summarizies 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 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
wiekiesjij.nl helps you find the politician of your choice based on expertise, professional background, age, religious affiliation, and political experience. More than 90% of Dutch candidates for national parliament filled-in an online questionnaire on which the system was based. It was made by the foundation "The New Way of Voting" (See: Het Nieuwe Stemmen or its international forum: ForumPOLITIX.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.
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).
Portugal
Demo.cratica by Manufactura IndependenteRussia
In Russia projects in the shpere of Government 2.0 is actively developing.Most active participants in this area are:
- Ivan Begtin webblog dedicated to web-technologies and eGovernment. Especially eGovernment issues
- Ekaterina Aksenova Gov-Gov webblog
- Alena Popova web-blog dedicated to Government 2.0 in Russia
Government Web catalog 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 mySocietyMySociety
mySociety is an e-democracy project of the UK-based registered charity named UK Citizens Online Democracy, that aims to build "socially focussed tools with offline impacts". It was founded by Tom Steinberg in September 2003, and started activity after receiving a £250,000 grant in September 2004...
explains how they have had to obtain much of their Parliamentary data by court action.
The site was first lunched in 2006 and redesigned in 2010.
Slovakia
KohoVolit.eu is a volunteer-run website providing a sample of votings of the Slovak Parliament allowing the user to test her or his own preferences against the MPs.Sweden
- Kalla fakta om de folkvalda Information about the parliament members compiled by Swedish TV4.
- Riksdagsmonitor covering Swedish parliament (The Riksdag) in English/Swedish. (Using Citizen Intelligence Agency). Its Source code and documentation is also available.
- OpenGov covering governmental data sources and documents of the legislative process.
- Skuggrix Shadow parliament, user may vote on same issues as parliament members.
- Artilect Riksdagsbevakning Tracking bills proposed by parliament members.
- Riksdagens syndikeringstjänst xml/rss/html/json feeds from Swedish Parliament(Riksdagen).
- Riksdagskollen DN Tracking bills proposed by parliament members.
- Valpejl SVT Swedish Television's web service Valpejl, where you can search information on all candidates aiming for the parliament, county or municipality in the 2010 September election.
- Min Ledamot Shows parliament members and attendance per post code.
- eDemokrat.se Shows new documents updates in the Riksdag,
- Engagemangsindex Shows activity in the Riksdag.
United Kingdom
The situation in the United Kingdom is very active, with several of the major volunteer projects run by mySocietyMySociety
mySociety is an e-democracy project of the UK-based registered charity named UK Citizens Online Democracy, that aims to build "socially focussed tools with offline impacts". It was founded by Tom Steinberg in September 2003, and started activity after receiving a £250,000 grant in September 2004...
. 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
TheyWorkForYou is a website run by mySociety, a project of registered charity UK Citizens Online Democracy, and is a tool for political campaigners and those interested in the Parliamentary activities of UK MPs, Lords, and Northern Ireland MLAs....
, which hosts the speeches in a user friendly form and creates email alerts and rss feeds, and Public Whip
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....
, 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 researches specifically into how MPs vote through his Revolts website and publications.
Commercial companies Dods, DeHavilland, Political Wizard and Randall's offer paid for parliamentary monitoring.
United States of America
- CampaignMoney
- EarmarkWatch
- GovTrack.us - GovTrack allows you to track the progress of legislation in the US. Offers access to data and apis as well.
- Legistorm - Online access to government disclosure documents.
- MAPLight - Looks at connection between money and politics.
- MetavidMetavidMetavid is a free-software wiki-based community archive project for audio video media. The site hosts public domain US legislative footage. It was started as a Digital Arts/New Media MFA thesis project of Michael Dale and Abram Stern under the advisement of Professor Warren Sack in late 2005 at the...
is a searchable archive of legislative video. - OpenCongress - OpenCongress brings together official government information with news and blog coverage for compressive site on legislative activity
- OpenSecrets.org - This website from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics tracks money in U.S. federal politics, including contributions and expenditures for congressional and presidential campaigns, lobbying, personal finances of politicians, the "revolving door" between government and private industry, 527 organizations and more.
- ProgressivePunch - Provides summaries and ratings based on votes.
- WashingtonWatch
- Watchdog.net - Combines various data sources into a unified interface. APIs and data dumps for everything. Free software. Also provides tools to get involved with politics.
- Distributed Government - A proposal for re-enfranchising voters by a "division of labor" both among voters and among legislators.
- congressdb - Votes statistics
Comparisons between countries
- Arthur Edwards at Erasmus University Rotterdam has analysed retrospective voter information websites in the United States, United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
- Simon Hix at LSE analyses roll call voting records across Europe.
- VoteWorld in the US is creating an archive of roll call voting records internationally.
- Civic Software Index, which plots countries against monitoring systems