Parliamentary informatics
From Wikipedia, the free 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:
- 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 and, as far as the text of successfully enacted legislation is concerned, legal informatics in general.
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[edit] Issues
Access to parliamentary information is the most significant issue in parliamentary informatics; access may be inhibited technologically through the provision of parliamentrary 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.
[edit] Round the world
[edit] United Nations
The website http://www.undemocracy.com/ gives hyperlinked access to transcripts of the General Assembly and Security Council of the United Nations, with parsed voting records.
[edit] 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”.
[edit] Canada
How'd They Vote? is a volunteer-run website providing information about the voting record and speeches of MPs.
[edit] European Parliament (Dutch members)
Testbeeld Europa (Dutch languauge) shows how the Dutch Members of the European Parliament voted. Made by the nonpartisan, non-profit Instituut voor Publiek en Politiek (IPP).
[edit] France
The Parliament in France does not publish any voting rolls.[citation needed] 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.[1]
[edit] Georgia
Georgian Parliament has information on MPs, and their voting records. Civilin has information about legislation. My Parliament aggregates it all together.
[edit] Kenya
mzalendo: Eye On Kenyan Parliament provides electronic information about the Kenyan parliament, which is otherwise only available offline.
[edit] Lithuania
iDemokratija provides statistics for MP attendance, votes, speeches, rebellions, travel maps, popularity ratings based on internet search result counts. It is a volunteer-run website.
[edit] Malaysia
[edit] New Zealand
TheyWorkForYou.co.nz is a volunteer-run project covering all of the NZ Parliament.
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).
[edit] 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: Forum
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.
[edit] Romania
The pentru Politici Publice has created a web site with lots of structured data about the Romanian Parliament. Adrian Moraru of this organization said in an interview with mySociety explains how they have had to obtain much of their Parliamentary data by court action.
[edit] United Kingdom
The situation in the United Kingdom is very active, with several of the major volunteer projects run by mySociety. The official UK Parliament website provides transcripts of the Parliamentary debates and votes in plain text form, and these are parsed by the 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 votes through his Revolts website and publications.
Commercial companies Dod's, DeHavilland, Political Wizard and Randall's offer parliamentary monitoring for money.
[edit] 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.
