Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW) Should we sign on to their letter? Deadline Sept. 10

[Jessica Dheere]

This is from the Sunlight Foundation's International Mailing list. Should we sign the letter as the OpenLeb community?

Hello everyone,

I'm sure most of you are aware of the several events surrounding the Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW) from September 15 to 25.

In coordination with events during the week, Sunlight is planning to launch a quick campaign to raise awareness around the importance of open formats when publishing legislative information. We intend to send a letter to all the national legislatures around the globe calling them to make parliamentary data "open data by default," in agreement with the principles of the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. You can find the letter attached as a PDF, ODT and in a viewable google document.

 

We'd love to get as much support as possible from supporting national and local level PMOs and members of global transparency community to help demonstrate the constituents' appetite for transparency, and the local impact this type of action can have. If you want to endorse the letter, please let us know before September 10.

We also encourage everyone to not only sign the letter, but also translate it to your local language and try to get some local media attention through press releases, social media or other media hooks for the week of September 15. OpeningParliament has grown into a truly global network, and we've managed to create a strong consensus for how legislatures should operate. We hope that we can count on you to help us translate these letters, register your support, and clearly communicate our agenda during GLOW.

We are planning send out the letter to each administrative office via emails (and in some cases through regular mails) on September 15 and address it to the current presidents of national assemblies, or similar authorities. As we have looked through this list, it has come to our attention that some of the information on national assemblies is out of date. We are working to verify the data ourselves, but if you can provide verification for who the head of your national legislature is, that would be very helpful!

 

We are excited to send a clear, global message to legislatures -- your data should be open, and we are ready to help.

Thanks everyone for your support,

The Sunlight team

-- 

John Wonderlich

Policy Director, Sunlight Foundation

@johnwonderlich

[Mireille Raad]

Hello Jess,

I agree with the principles shared in the document, specially the open by default - but the question of government capacity comes to mind specially after reading the following quote:

"While formats such as HTML and PDF are easily accessible for humans, they are difficult for computers to process. Providing data in structured formats, such as JSON and XML, add significant ease to access and allow more advanced analysis, especially with large amounts of information. "

So, I wonder, if there are any tools or software, specially open source, being worked on by sunlight or at least any "open legislation standard"... something that either NGO or gov can use... it would be nice to be able to "compare laws" across countries or have access to them - specially commercial etc.

I know at worldbank, in my unit, there is a team that does open parliament stuff - i'll check out what they are doing and share.

Best,

Mireille

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mireille.io

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[Jessica Dheere]

Great question. So basically you're saying that in addition to simply committing to be open, governments need to develop this capacity...and maybe we need to help them in doing so, yes? 

And when you say "any tools," you mean tools that can transform these locked formats into more machine-readable ones?

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[Mireille Raad]

Hey,

Yeah - somehow suggesting it - if you want govt to do something, it would really help if you tell them it is free and we can teach you how to do it or we can do it for you even. 

I can't imagine ministers arguing that publishing on internet and only open format like pdf and html are not "open enough" because they are not "machine readables".

For tools - yes, I mean software and algorithm that can extract useful information and label it from the html and pdf specially that in legislation writing and writing styles can mean a lot, include lot of nuance and make the difference... so those "tools" and algorithms need to be available to make legislation machine readables and give us the "gain" from having to do all those efforts.

I personally think the value of such project is when you put all legislation together of all countries in one machine readable database, not in publishing individual country legislation in machine readable... because then it can be used to track legislation changes over time and do comparision. which is priceless for research, writing, journalism and international businesses.

Hope that was a better answer then the above and less confusing.

cheers

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mireille.io

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[Marc Farra]

There are some tools that are already available to turn PDFs into machine readable formats. For example, there is Tesseract for character recognition and Tabula for extracting tables. I've used them before but they're not so effective on Arabic text.

As for the database of laws, there was a lot of talk at the Open Knowledge Festival of the Poplus project (http://poplus.org) but I haven't tried it yet. It allows you to upload transcripts of Parliamentary sessions, bills and lists of politicians to share with others.

Another interesting approach is to tag government data with RDFa information. There was a seminar in Lebanon about steps to get to government open data given by Michalis Vafopoulos. He says that the first (and the very least) step is to start publishing PDFs, then start thinking about machine readable formats and lastly tag the data and datasets with semantic information for cross correlation with other datasets. I know that Michalis has done this for http://publicspending.net

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[Mireille Raad]

Hello Marc :)

good to hear from you :)

Do you wanna give those tools a test run? and share detailed feedback with mo and jess on them? Specially when it comes to arabic stuff :) ?

cheers

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mireille.io

[Alex Salha]

Hello all

I'm very interested in what you guys are doing.

I've worked on Access to Info in Lebanon last year.

I am currently in Milan following an internship on Organised Crime Groups and another one on Open Government and Freedom of Information.

I'm sorry I'm not being able to follow, I'm writing my thesis and I have both internships.

However I would like to get updates from you guys. 

Ciao

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