Entering a second quarter century of supporting and enhancing cutting edge research in the interface between law and computer technology, the 2013 JURIX conference will take place at the University of Bologna from 11 to 13 December 2013.

The Report of the World e-Parliamente Conference 2012 is now available. This report summarizes the presentations and practices showcased during the different sessions of the conference,  and highlights the main points of discussion.

The Parliamentary Development Project for Ukraine has worked with the Division of Computerized Systems of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine and the Institute of Telecommunications and Global Information Space of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine to provide the Ukrainian translation of the original English language World e-Parliament Report 2012.

The Council of Federation of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation held an EPCRD seminar “Modern technologies to support parliamentary activities - traditions and challenges" in Saint Petersburg (19-21 September 2013). This seminar was organized by the Council of Federation, in cooperation with the Secretariat of the Interparliamentary Assembly of Member Nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States (IPA CIS), in the framework of the ECPRD Area of interest "Parliamentary Practice & Procedures".

The University of Hull published 3 guides aimed at practitioners on the use of websites and social media by parliaments, drawing from the research developed for the project Managing Parliament’s Image. The themes of the guides are: Organising and Managing Parliamentary Websites, Using Parliamentary Websites as an Engagement Tool, How Parliaments Use Social Media.
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On January 30th, the U.S. House of Representatives held a public meeting on its efforts to release more legislative information to the public in ways that facilitate its reuse. This was the second meeting hosted by the Bulk Data Task Force where members of the public were included; it began privately meeting in September 2012.
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TransparencyCamp is an "unconference" for opengov: an event where, each year, journalists, developers, technologists, policy-makers, government officials, students, academics, and everyone in between gather to share their knowledge about how to use new technologies and policies to make our government really work for the people -- and to help our people work smarter with our government.

Providing parliamentary information in open and structured formats reduces the barriers to citizen use of legal information. How? Open and structured documents have properties underlying the visible information, such as metadata, that allow machines to recognize various characteristics about the document – including its title, whether it’s a bill or transcript, and even its contents in many instances.
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The House of Representatives' document portal docs.house.gov, launched in January 2012 with a rich set of data about floor proceedings, including all bills and amendments, makes now also available in bulk XML format extensive information and documents related to committee activities.
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The International Open Data Hackathon, to take place on 23 February, is a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world's local, regional and national governments.

The hackathon was held at the UK Parliament in late November during the Parliament Week, a new national initiative which aims to build greater understanding of and engagement with parliamentary democracy in the UK. The Parliament Hack was open to developers of all ages, designers and games developers.

The presentations and videos of the latest ECPRD meetings are now online.

• ECPRD ICT Seminar
  "Open the window, close the door"
  Budapest, 15-16 November 2012
• Parliaments on the Net X
  Mobility, Transparency and open parliament: best practices in Parliamentary web sites
  Madrid, 31 May - 1 June 2012
• Annual meeting of the ECPRD Working Group on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)
  “Do more with less: tight budgets and improved IT services to MPs and Administration
  Athens,  11-12 November 2011

For MPs and the parliamentary administration, the use of social media remains at an experimental stage. The objective of this conference is therefore to exchange experience on the risks and benefits of social media, and to contribute to more effective use of social media by parliaments.

The Library of Congress of the United States of America has launched the new legislative information resource web page Congress.gov, beta version. Congress.gov makes federal United States legislative information freely available to the public.