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.

In the framework of the European Commission funded project “Support to ICT Strategic Planning in SADC Parliaments”, a first technical mission has been undertaken to the National Assembly of Namibia (12 to 16 December 2011) to carry out an assessment of the status of ICT in the Parliament and make initial recommendations for the development of an ICT Strategic Plan.

The technical assistance mission team from the Global Centre with support from the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil, succesfully completed the first mission to the National Assembly of the Republic of Suriname. Besides assessing the ICT infrastructure, organization, services delivery within the institution a thourough analysis was made of the archiving standards, policies and needs.

At the request of the Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU), the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament fielded a technical assistance mission to analyse the current use of information and communication technologies in the Parliament of Sierra Leone, from 21 to 25 November 2011. The mission focused on the assessment of the state of technology of the parliament taking into consideration the existing parliamentary process, procedures and organizational framework.

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.

Within the framework of the European Commission funded project “Support to ICT Strategic Planning in SADC Parliaments”, the Global Centre undertook a technical assistance mission to the National Assembly of Tanzania from 31 October to 4 November 2011. The mission focused on perception and understanding of the vision, mission and core values of the Parliament and made the assessment of the ICT system in order to deliver a report with strategic direction and recommendations.