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. 

The New York State Senate has been working on FOSS open government initiatives for constituent relationship management, open legislation, geocoding, and more. That software can be downloaded from GitHub here: http://github.com/nysenate
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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.

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.

The 2012 Law Via the Internet (LVI 2012) took place at the Cornell Legal Information Institute (Ithaca, New York) from 7 to 9 October 2012 and covered themes on free and open access to legal information: open government and e- participation, legal publishing, open access and sustainability, applications, data management, etc.

The World e-Parliament Conference 2012 was held at the Chamber of Deputies of Italy, in Rome, on 13, 14 and 15 September. The Conference concluded on the International Day of Democracy, established in 2008 by the UN General Assembly.

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.

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.

As part of the initiative to increase House transparency and improve access to legislative data, the Committee on House Administration adopted new standards that require all House legislative documents be published electronically in an open, searchable format on one centralized website.

Developing standard solutions is a very typical feature for the institutionalisation phase in the life‐cycle of new technologies, starting from applications for everyday business of larger groups of customers, but ending up with solutions even for specialized and complex business processes like the normative process. At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, the time is ripe for standardisation even in the field of electronically supporting the normative system, or more specifically the normative process.