en.europa-eu-audience

US House of Representatives : Pelosi Addresses e-Parliament Conference

Version française 

Source: http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2009/11/04/pelosi-addresses-e-parliament-conference/ , by John Wonderlich , Tags: eparl, Nancy Pelosi, Pelosi

Speaker Pelosi yesterday spoke on a panel to kick off the World eParliament Conference 2009, in the US House of Representatives.

Her prepared remarks are available here, and include the following:

“In the history of American democracy, there was a time when a message could travel only as fast as a horse could gallop or a ship could sail. Today, a message from the American people to their representatives in Congress travels as fast as a citizen can twitter, blog, or post to Facebook…

Led by the innovation and enthusiasm of young people, Americans and Members of Congress are holding a running conversation – in real time. There is no greater tool to increase transparency than the internet. Now, Americans can watch committee hearings, check votes, read bills, and review financial disclosures–all online. Next month, they will be able to see exactly how Members of Congress are spending their office funds, and at the start of next year, they will be able to watch and search our House floor proceedings in real time …

Maps and Bills

Version française

BillMaps is a mashup between Google Maps and the two political tracking websites, OpenCongress and GovTrack.

The site uses the Google Maps API to show which senators are sponsoring congressional bills.

Senat.fr : a better way to watch the legislative process or a customized subject

Version française

Subscribe to a RSS feed for each piece of legislation. Follow all the steps of the legislative process from the Impact Assessment and  the Draft to the Act. 
Subscribe to a feed by subject. Be informed directly of the publication of all documents relating to Agriculture, Ecology, Education, ... 

These RSS feeds complement the existing tools to monitor freely legislation which are proposed since 2005 by the site of the French Senate: http://www.senat.fr/rss/index.html

It would be great to get the same tools for the european legislative process on The Legislative Observatory and/or PreLex

 

Australia : Parliament House Clerk advocates online engagement for parliamentary committees

Version française

In a recent submission (PDF) to the Federal government's Inquiry into the effectiveness of House Committees, I C Harris, the Clerk of the House, suggested that Technological developments offer tremendous potential to extend the reach of communities work in times of community participation.

Read more on the source: http://egovau.blogspot.com/2009/09/parliament-house-clerk-advocates-online.html (28-09-2009)

Access to legislation in Europe : Guide to the legal gazettes

Version française

Noted on the 20/09/2009, by Emmanuel Barthe // La documentation juridique

See the post http://www.precisement.org/blog/Un-guide-des-journaux-officiels-en.html

Access to legislation in Europe : Guide to the legal gazettes and other official information sources in the European Union and the European Free Trade Association

Free of charge for download (version PDF )

Order it on paper free of charge at http://bookshop.europa.eu

The implications of codecision for national parliamentary scrutiny

Version française
Source: European Union Select Committee , House of Lords

An interesting point of view

The Select Committee published its report on Tuesday 21 July 2009.

Download and read the whole document (186 pages but with a summary from http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200809/ldselect/ldeucom/125/125.pdf

Towards collaborative web-based impact assessment

Version française

Abstract

Impact assessment (IA) is a key method for the legislator to evaluate policies, norms or regulations currently under development. Experts use IA to gather and analyze input from many individuals to obtain clear problem statements, estimations regarding policies etc., and use this information to compare policy alternatives. Currently, the opinions, expertise etc. gathered for IA need to be structured by hand. Thus, the analysis steps of IA are time-consuming, and IA does not scale with the number of persons involved. In this paper, we introduce a collaborative approach for IA.

Based on a Web 2.0 architecture, we let a community of individuals derive the potential, downsides and design alternatives of policies collaboratively. An important characteristic of our approach is that it guides individuals through the process of creating structured input. Our approach is fully implemented, and we have evaluated it together with legal experts using the structured-case method. While our evaluation reveals that the acceptance of web-based IA strongly depends on the user interface, it also acknowledges that our approach can be an important tool for future IA.

Source : http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1556211
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 390 archive
Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Social Networks: Making Connections between Citizens, Data and Government table of contents

SESSION: Knowledge management and collaboration table of contents

Pages : 190-198   , Year of Publication: 2009 , ISBN:978-1-60558-535-2

Authors

Clemens Heidinger	Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany
Erik Buchmann	Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany
Klemens Böhm	Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany

Sponsor : Digital Government Society of North America

Publisher  Digital Government Society of North America  

Telecom Package Legislative Tracking in Europe

Version française

The topic has triggered passions in France: the Wikipedia article on French version available on http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_Création_et_Internet  indicates that this article provokes controversy neutrality (see discussion). Consider this article with caution. (FAQ). 
But this issue does not concern only France. The election of an MEP from the Swedish "Pirate" demonstrates (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party ). 

The LaQuadrature.net initiative is interesting. 
This is certainly not as friendly as the "tracking" of the work of  U.S. Congress http://www.govtrack.us  but it is a good start, available in several languages. Tracking work would of course be easier if the issuing official documents (EU but also national governments and parliaments) allow civil society to automatically insert RSS feeds focused on any particular legislative initiative inside their site (the so called “syndication”)

National Parliaments and European Commission: 2008 Report

Version française

Source : July 11, 2009 EUlaw http://eulaw.typepad.com/eulawblog/2009/07/national-parliaments-and-european-commission-2008-report.html

The EC Commission has published its annual report on its relations with national parliaments (COM (2009) 343).

Back in 2006, the Commission published a rather verbose paper (Com (2006) 211) stating on page 9 that it would provide all national parliaments in the member States not just consultation documents prepared by the Commission (green and white papers and communications), as already required by the Protocol to the Treaty of Amsterdam, but also all new Commission proposals. We noted this here.

Since then, the number of opinions received from national parliaments has increased steadily from 53 in 2006, 115 in 2007 to 200 in 2008.

The 2008 report makes quite interesting reading generally. There's a section on the effects of the opinions received on policy. The opinions of national parliaments tended to be in line with the positions taken by the member States in Council.

IMHO (In My Humble Opinion) : IPEX website is improving very slowly

European Parliament’s Vote Watch

Version française

A new service to watch with the new European Parliament

VoteWatch.eu is an independent monitoring website of EU politics. It provides detailed information about parliamentarians' voting records and formal political activities – from committee work to parliamentary reports – and includes easy-to-access information on the political coalitions that are formed around policy issues.

VoteWatch.eu makes it possible for citizens, the media and other stakeholders to track the performance of Members of the European Parliament (MEP) and the groups they form. The website is updated on a continuous basis and as soon as votes are taken in the European Parliament's plenary.

Source : http://www.votewatch.eu/

See also the service http://www.govtrack.us/

GovTrack.us helps you keep tabs on the U.S. Congress --- This is an innovative clone of THOMAS. GovTrack is not affiliated with the U.S. government; it is non-commercial, non-partisan, and an open source project.