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 White House has released the software code for its IT Dashboard and TechStat toolkit. The initiative was coordinated through Civic Commons, a code-sharing project incubated within Code for America that helps governments share technology for the public good, with support from OpenPlans.

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.

The Africa i-Parliament Action Plan convened a workshop to localise the Bungeni Parliamentary Information System and Akoma Ntoso Standards to the requirements of the different Portuguese speaking parliaments in Africa.

Open discussion with the audience.

Presentation by Mr. Flemming Sorensen, Head of Service, Directorate for Information Technologies, Directorate General for Innovation and Technological Support, European Parliament

Presentation by Mr. Tom Van Engers, Professor of Legal Knowledge Management, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam

Presentation by Ms. Monica Palmirani, Associate Professor of Legal Informatics, CIRSFID, University of Bologna

Presentation by Mr. João Alberto de Oliveira Lima, Systems Analyst, Federal Senate of Brazil

Introductory remarks by Flavio Zeni, Chief Technical Adviser, Africa i-Parliament Action Plan, UN/DESA, Chair of the session.

Spain's public administrations are an important driver for the advance of open source software on desktop computers. That is one of the conclusions of a desktop migration guide published by the IT department of the city of Zaragoza.

The Estonian ministry of the Environment has saved millions of Euro over the past ten years by using the open source suite of office application, OpenOffice, says Meelis Merilo, the head of the IT departent at the ministry.

Drupal developers are working on distribution of Drupal, focusing on use by public administration, called Open Public. The groups is now organising the Drupal Government Days on 7 to 9 April, where they hope to present the first practical applications of this tailor made Drupal. A team of government web experts and open source developers are devising software solutions to meet the special needs of e-government projects to improve government performance.