The e-Democracia platform offers simple web 2.0 tools to allow citizens to interact with lawmakers on specific issues, helping to connect Brazilian citizens to national lawmakers across thousands of miles of geography. Citizens can use the portal and social media platforms to engage Congressmen, mark-up legislation, and propose and debate solutions to policy problems. The platform has facilitated cross-country dialogue among disparate groups and has thousands of active users. It has also improved legislative transparency.

The Open Government Partnership, National Democratic Institute, and the Congress of Chile will hold a webinar to introduce the Legislative Openness Working Group (LOWG) on 10 September 2013. The LOWG is intended to deepen the exchange of knowledge across governments, parliaments, civil society and international institutions on the opportunities and challenges associated with legislative openness.

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.

As part of the U.S. House of Representatives’ commitment to improving transparency and accountability, the House announced the creation of the new online XML version of the United States Code that is available for bulk downloading. The XML version of the United States Code, which resides on the website of the House’s Office of the Law Revision Counsel, is open and available to all, free of charge at:  http://uscodebeta.house.gov/download/download.shtml

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 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.

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.

La Conférence mondiale 2012 sur l’e-Parlement a eu lieu à la Chambre des députés d'Italie, à Rome, les 13, 14 et 15 Septembre. La clôture de la Conférence a coincidé avec la Journée internationale de la démocratie, établie en 2008 par l'Assemblée générale des Nations Unies.

• Read the Report of the World e-Parliament Conference 2012

The World e-Parliament Conference 2012 was held at the Chamber of Deputies of Italy, in Rome, on 13, 14 and 15 September.