Data

General Issues
Governance & Political Institutions
Specific Topics
Government Transparency
Scope of Influence
Multinational
Links
https://web.archive.org/web/20120204202816/http://www.parliaments.info/
Start Date
Facilitators
No
Face-to-Face, Online, or Both
Online
Decision Methods
Not Applicable

CASE

Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan

February 19, 2019 Scott Fletcher Bowlsby
August 5, 2018 Scott Fletcher Bowlsby
February 2, 2018 Lucy J Parry, Participedia Team
February 1, 2018 Lucy J Parry, Participedia Team
General Issues
Governance & Political Institutions
Specific Topics
Government Transparency
Scope of Influence
Multinational
Links
https://web.archive.org/web/20120204202816/http://www.parliaments.info/
Start Date
Facilitators
No
Face-to-Face, Online, or Both
Online
Decision Methods
Not Applicable

Africa i-Parliaments is a set of United Nations initiatives and projects designed to enable African Parliaments to facilitate democracy and good governance through technology applications.

 Note: the following entry is a stub. Please help us complete it. 

Problems and Purpose

The Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan is an Africa-wide initiative that aims to modernize African Parliaments’ information management capabilities and provide them with skills, services and applications that will allow them to become open, participatory, knowledge-based and learning organizations. 

"Improved access to documents regarding parliamentary and judiciary activities enables citizens to hold Parliaments accountable, stimulates greater efficiency and enhances democracy and transparency in the actions of parliaments and courts, thereby providing further safeguards to equitable justice and citizens’ trust" [1]

Background History and Context

Organizing, Supporting, and Funding Entities

The Action Plan is a project of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

Participant Recruitment and Selection 

Methods and Tools Used

The initiative involves several projects, outlined below. There is not much information available online about the initiatives and the following has been primarily taken from available sources.

Bungeni

Bungeni is a Parliamentary and Legislative Information System that aims at making Parliaments more open and accessible to citizens, virtually allowing them " inside Parliament" or "Bungeni" the Kiswahili word for "inside Parliament". It is based on open standards, and open source applications that aim to provide solutions for drafting, managing, consolidating and publishing legislative and other parliamentary documents [2]

Bungeni is an open source parliamentary information system that provides a world-leading solution for the drafting, revision, amendment, and publishing phases of the parliamentary document life-cycle. Bungeni is available in several languages (English, French, Portuguese, and Swahili) and, being fully internationalised, can be translated into others. The Bungeni pre-deployment phase began in February 2010 with testing by 14 parliaments. Features tuning and localisation following feedback from these parliaments will take place in the second quarter of 2010. The deployment is foreseen in the third quarter of 2010. Akoma Ntoso is a set of common XML standards for the management of digital parliamentary and legislative documents in order to ensure the effective exchange of machine readable parliamentary documents [3].

Akoma Ntoso

Akoma Ntoso is a project to make parliamentary documents machine readable so they can be made publicly available online. This requires the standardisation of documents and data rather than simply publishing simple text documents online.

What Went On: Process, Interaction, and Participation 

Influence, Outcomes, and Effects 

Analysis and Lessons Learned 

See Also 

Voter Information Services

References

[1] Akoma Ntoso (2016). Akoma Ntoso in Detail. Available at: http://www.akomantoso.org/?page_id=36

[2] Kaonga, V. (2010). Bungeni - Parliamentary and Legislative Information System. Technology for Transparency Network. Available at: http://transparency.globalvoicesonline.org/project/bungeni-parliamentary...

[3] International Telecommunications Union (n.d.) Interconnected Parliament: Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan. International Telecommunications Union. Available at: https://www.itu.int/net4/wsis/stocktaking/projects/Project/Details?proje...

External Links 

https://slideplayer.com/slide/6988778/

Notes

Lead image: Flavio Zeni | SlidePlayer https://goo.gl/LS5EJG