The U.S. House of Representatives held its second annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference on 22 May, in the Capitol Visitor Center Auditorium. The 2012 conference brought together the government insiders that create and publish legislative data with the public that consumes and reuses the information. The 2013 conference addressed the "use and future of legislative data," and covered topics including electronic legislative archiving, XML and metadata standards, and updates on beta.congress.gov. 

Since 23 February 2013 the Senate of Italy started to publish on its website all bills in XML, using an Akoma Ntoso compliant scheme (in addition to the usual HTML, PDF, and ePub formats). Also, the Senate of Italy recently released the open data portal dati.senato.it

A study group in the German parliament advises changes to the national budget laws, to allow publishing as open source the software written for or by public administrations. Currently, Germany's budget law prevents public administrations from giving ICT solutions away for free.

A conference on XML and data on the web will be held at the University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic from 8 to 10 February 201.

Topics

This paper presents a proposal for an open XML standard for the markup of legal documents: METALex. The standard provides a generic and easily extensible framework for the XML encoding of the structure and contents of legal and paralegal documents. It differs from other existing metadata schemes in two respects: It is language and jurisdiction independent and it aims to accommodate uses of XML beyond search and presentation services.

La Conferencia Mundial de 2012 sobre el Parlamento electrónico está organizada conjuntamente por las Naciones Unidas y la Unión Interparlamentaria, a través del Centro Mundial para las TIC en el Parlamento, y hospedada por la Cámara de Diputados de Italia en Roma.

The school provided knowledge of the most significant ICT standards emerging for legislation, judiciary, parliamentary and administrative documents. The course provided an understanding of their impact in the different phases of the legislative and administrative process, awareness of the tools based on legal XML standards and their constellations, and the ability to participate in the preparation and use of standard-compliant documents throughout law-making process.
This year the course took place in Ravenna, Italy, on 10-15 September 2012.
It was followed on 17-18 September by a Akoma Ntoso Developers Workshop.

English version | Version française

Read the Summary of the Meeting

Improvements in technology over the last decade offer parliaments new opportunities to foster the democratic values of transparency, openness and accountability. Making information available on a timely basis in machine readable and re-usable format has become a vital means for enhancing the transparency of legislative bodies and for improving public access to parliamentary documents. The use of open document standards is one of the essential and effective ways of achieving these goals through technology.
To address these challenges in an international context, the United Nations, the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the U.S. House of Representatives organized the event Achieving Greater Transparency in Legislatures through the Use of Open Document Standards. The International Meeting was held at the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. on 27, 28 and 29 February 2012.

The Reports, prepared by the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament, intend to help legislatures to harness the potential benefits of ICT for their work and establish key goals and priorities for exploiting this valuable resource. While providing evidence of the complexities of e-parliament, the Reports suggest ways to overcome some of the obstacles to the effective use of technology in parliamentary settings.

The Summer School Lex programme of the 2011 Edition will take place on 5-10 September 2011 Ravenna, Italy, Faculty of Law. Also this year the Summer School LEX is hosted by the Universty of Bologna, Ravenna location with the scientific partnership of EUI, IDT, ITTIG, CIRSFID, CS and Leibniz Center for Law and with the support of LegalXML-OASIS.
Deadline for the early-bird registration: June 30th.

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor sent a letter to the Clerk of the House calling for the development and adoption of new electronic data standards to help make legislative information more open and Congress more accountable to the American people. A PDF of the letter can be found here.