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INTRODUCTION
Some of your comments have raised larger issues that affect more than one of the proposed guidelines and in some cases, all of them. I have tried to briefly summarize these issues below. In a few cases, I also included your original comments so that we can more easily see what has already been said.
I invite you to make any additional comments you wish to any of these issues. From this collaborative discussion I hope that we might reach agreement on several “Principles” for legislative websites that could become part of our recommendations. The issues listed below are in a rough alphabetical order based on the initial key word in the heading. No priority is implied.
MAJOR ISSUES AND POTENTIAL PRINCIPLES
1. BICAMERAL LEGISLATURES
What guidelines should we propose for bicameral legislative bodies? See two representative comments below.
MB: For bicameral parliaments that have joint procedures, joint bodies, etc:
Question: On what site (of the lower or upper chamber) can these joints items be included; or a joint site of the Parliament to be recommended.
RC: Is there a case for some sort of recommendation for bicameral parliaments, not necessarily along the lines of one site or two, I would say, but at least in terms of there being clear signposting of one site from the other?
Here is a proposal for your consideration:
In the case of bicameral legislatures, the following guidelines would be added to Section 1.
1. A single page that introduces citizens to both chambers with links to the websites of each
2. On the websites of each individual chamber, a prominent link to the website of the other.
3. All information that explains the legislative and oversight process includes references to the responsibilities of both chambers.
4. All status information includes action in both chambers, including committee and plenary actions if appropriate.
RC: I support this proposal which, to my mind, is manageable and helpful to users but allows each chamber to ‘own’ their information where they choose to.
2. DESIGN PRINCIPLES
ES offered some interesting principles of design for different audiences that they have implemented in Italy. The latest version of Section 5 includes the language proposed at the end of the comment below. We might also want to consider including the some of the additional explanatory sentences in our introduction to the guidelines
ES: My suggestion:
In our recent experience, at the Chamber of Deputies, we have realized that we should take into account that the parliamentary web site performs different tasks and should meet different requirements. We have exemplified this concept in a matrix based on 3 “perspectives”:
- information perspective
- documentation perspective
- communication perspective
For each of these perspectives we have tried to clarify:
- the target (the user’s profile)
- the core information (strategic contents)
- the location in the web site (or better, in the websites that are included in the “parliamentary platform”).
- the design features
This clarification is proving to be useful in the process of reorganization of our web site .
I don’t know how this concept can be put in a brief sentence, but I propose something like:
“The design elements and choices should be derived by a comprehensive vision of different tasks, different requirements and different user’s profiles.”
or
“Colour codes and graphical patterns should be thought as useful means to a better orientation of the user through the different “areas” of the web site.”
RC: I support this and have made a suggestion in section 5.4F of the draft guidelines
3. GENDER ISSUES
CM has asked an important question – should there be guidelines that focus on highlighting the work of women who are members or deputies? The challenge would be what groups in addition to women might merit this special focus. This will also vary considerably by country. One option might be to recommend links to formal and informal groups if they exist and are recognized within the parliament. In the US Congress, for example, there are several such groups. Example: the Congressional Black Caucus in the US House. See http://www.house.gov/kilpatrick/cbc/get_involved.html
On the other hand, we may decide that this is important issue but one that is outside the scope of these guidelines.
[GS: See my comments in the text of the guidelines. I suggest that the gender issue is not treated as a separate issue in our guidelines. But that statistical info should be included under statistics 1..3 (how many? etc.) or more general info under 1.2 History (when did women enter politics, present situation etc.). Can we include a sentence about this'at the relevant places'in the text ?]
RC: I recognise the importance of the question but would suggest that we are cautious here, for two reasons. First, as Jeff says, what about other groups: ethnic or national minorities; people with disabilities; and so on? And, secondly, some of these issues can be very sensitive. An example: a member parliament recently asked for data on black MPs in European Parliaments via the ECPRD network. The Co-Directors of ECPRD decided that this request should be withdrawn as it could be seen as having racist connotations. I personally disagree fundamentally with them and will raise the issue at the next meeting of the ECPRD Executive Committee – my point is that what is seen as perfectly OK in some countries risks being very challenging in others. For that reason - if others feel that this is something that should be included within the guidelines - I would, as ever, favour a broadly permissive approach such as that Jeff suggests here.
4. MEMBER INFORMATION
The proposed guideline is: “Official public information such as salary paid by the government, official travel, required financial disclosure, etc, but no personal confidential information, especially if it would put the member at risk.”
Are there limits we should recommend on information about members? Alternatively are there specific items we should recommend that might be controversial in some countries? See comments below.
Comments:
MP: Is it ethical to have confidential information in parliamentary websites? I make this question here as there is a section dedicated for MPP in our website (http://www.parliament.lk/ListContent.do?language=E) in which MPP find certain information in confidential nature. However, this has been questioned by few constituents recently. I personally of the view that all information in parliament websites should be public!
GC COMMENT to Mahesh Perera:
If the information is Personal it might have some relevance and truly depends on your own country. As an example, The Mexican Government, in a spirit of transparency made available all salary information of their public officers, great you may say, however, that information was used by outlaws to kidnap officers.
\If the information relates to the legislative processes, I agree with you, as much information as possible should be open and available to the general public.
If the information relates to Voting and track of participation of MPPs, It is imperative to have it. If the information relates to Fiscal processes, Yes.
In short, my perspective is that “AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE” information has to be public, but always keep in mind the well being of MPPs and their personal and family security.
RC: I am afraid that I have got a bit lost here as I cannot find the text above in the draft guidelines – I have been looking at section 1.6. [And note that in some countries the MP’s salary is not paid by the government]. On the general point here, we are in difficult territory but – while I fully support openness - I would suggest that the website guidelines should not be the place where pressure is put on Parliaments or members to publish otherwise unpublished information. ‘As much as possoble’ of course, but not where there may be risks.
In the UK we are still dealing with some important decisions arising from our relatively recent Freedom of Information law. The House of Commons resisted publishing details of the allowances paid to MPs for a long time but has lost court cases and must publish these soon. However, MPs have objected to the publication of their home addresses on security grounds and (as far as I know) this will not now be done. So I would suggest that guidelines in this area should be along the lines:
‘Information such as salary, official travel, allowances paid, required disclosure of financial and other interests etc where this is in the public domain.’
5. OFFICIAL LANGUAGES
We do not have a consensus on how many and which. See comments below. This is very difficult. If we do not say “All” then we may be providing an excuse to exclude some groups. But if we do say “All”, we may be setting a standard that cannot be attained in countries that have a large number of official languages. The resources for translation required by the European Parliament are substantial. Your suggestions?
How many?
Comments:
EG: In the item [5.3.A] I think it should be in “all official languages”
SAF: If there is only one or 2 official languages this should be easy but for those countries with as many as 11 official languages - I don't know how all official languages would work.
MP: It is advisable to have the website in all official languages. For example, our Website is in all three official langue: Sinhala, Tamil, and English
GS: No – one of the official languages is enough as a recommendation. This is of course a very difficult question. And it differs from country to country. In stead of giving a number we could write a passage about the reason for having more languages (from a democratic point of view - for all inhabitants to be able to access info from and about parliament and also for sharing between national parliaments.)If a partial version is made – focus on the more permanent information, for example parliamentary history, the constitution, how parliament works, election, etc.
Which?
Comments:
CM yes, English
EG: In item [5.3.B] I think it ought to be in English, and the information provided should be what is included in topics [1] and [2], though not necessarily all of it.
GC: We all know that English is the “other language” therefore we should drop it
GS: Drop English. If a partial version is made – focus on the more permanent information, for example parliamentary history, the constitution, how parliament works, election, etc.
RC: No comment from me!
6. OPEN STANDARD FORMATS AND MAKING LEGISLATIVE DOCUMENTS AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOADING
There is increasing interest in some countries for legislatures to make their documents available to others for downloading in open standard formats such as XML. FZ has expressed strong support this idea and some of you have expressed agreement.
My own view is that this is one of the next important steps in achieving transparency. Parliaments should provide authoritative, engaging, and informative websites on their own, but they should also enable others to create useful websites using the official data of legislatures. This would increase the amount of information available to citizens and also provide greater assurance about its accuracy.
On the other hand, this is not strictly related to websites – it is a policy question that could be addressed through other means and does not require a website guideline. If we decide on that approach, we might still want to urge this development in our introduction to these guidelines.
RS: I agree that this is a good idea and, on advice, think that it is indeed something for the guidelines. In principle, enabling the re-use of parliamentary information could be considered a separate policy issue (much as something like copyright could). However, a parliament’s website is the obvious place to make data downloads available from, so it would be wrong to issue website guidelines without referring to this issue. Given the interest that there is in such information – and this is going to increase in future – the alternative to parliaments making such information available voluntarily would be that those who wanted to use it would resort to less-than-ideal methods, such as ‘screen-scraping’ and everyone would lose.
This leads to another issue, which had not crossed my mind before now, in that there is an overlap between this and copyright policy. First, I don’t recall that the draft guidelines say anything about copyright (forgive me if I have missed this). I suggest that they should. If we agree that the guidelines should say something positive about the re-use of data (and note that, in the EU, there is a directive which requires member states to facilitate the re-use of public sector data) copyright policy should be framed in such a way as to facilitate re-use rather than impede it. So a guideline might include something like
"Contains clear statements about the extent to which the information included on the website can be re-used by others and any restrictions (such as copyright) on that re-use."
As an illustration, our website has a statement, linked from every page (I think) about copyright and the availability of “click-use” licences which can be downloaded and which enable third parties to re-use our information.
http://www.parliament.uk/site_information/parliamentary_copyright.cfm
[GS: I agree. We have a statement on our (Norwgian) website saying that all info is free and for re-use. This is stated on a page "About the website"]
[GS: I have a problem with the use of legislative documents. In Norway we talk about parliamentary documents (beacuse not all are legislative in our system). Could we instead write "6 Open standards...making parliamentary documents...?? Or does this make a problem in other countries]
7. PARLIAMENTARY DATA versus DATA FROM OTHERS
Should we recommend that parliament’s site include only its own data but that it link to data from others? Or should we say that parliaments are encouraged to acquire, organize, and present data in ways that are useful to their members and the public regardless of the source?
The comment from Marian below is an excellent example of an instance when parliament needed to take in data from another source and present it in a better manner. From another perspective, however, Rob has argued that there are limits to what a parliamentary website should link to. See his comment below.
Is there a principle we want to propose here?
2008/11/12 Marian Botocan <mbotocan@cdep.ro>
Regarding the subject, in Romania, parliamentary elections will be held at the end of this month (on November 30). During this year, the electoral law has been changed so that party list voting systems was replaced by a uninominal voting system (every elector will vote for one senator and one deputy instead of a list of persons).
The list of electoral colleges and the candidates for every college is published on the site of the Central Electoral Authority.. These are plain lists, not easily to be searched.
On the other hand many people are losing interest and confidence in political life and as a consequence smaller and smaller percentage of citizens are going to vote.
This is why, here in the ITC Dept. of the Chamber of Deputies, we have decided to create a database of electoral colleges and candidates, so that every one, using the Chamber of Deputies web site, to be able to look for the name of the candidates in his/her electoral college, just inputting his/her address. After the elections, we'll also be able to answer the question: „who is my deputy/senator?" using this database.
This is an example of duplicating the information published by the Central Electoral Authority, in order to provide enhanced facilities for the electors.
RC: I have some concerns here [about linking to government and civil society documents] on the grounds that links to civil society documents and, in some cases, government documents will necessarily involve selection, which in turn gives rise to risk. To put it bluntly, if we as parliaments pick out some NGO documents or websites, say, there is a risk that those we don’t select will complain, there will be favourites of certain MPs who will make cases for them to be included and so on. I think that parliamentary websites should concentrate on what the parliaments themselves ‘own’ – though a set of straightforward links to the sites of government departments etc is OK
RC: I apologise for saying more under this heading but hope that I can distinguish what I think are two separate points. I agree with Marian’s point that there are some external sites and sources of data which parliaments will want to link to, or use/re-use, and that is entirely correct. My objection is to having a guideline which says (in effect) that parliaments must link to websites and comments from external organisations, since that inevitably leads to problems of selection and risks of bias. I am very happy if the guidelines leave the decisions in the hands of parliaments as to what they link to and use from external sources
8. PARLIAMENTARY versus PRESIDENTIAL SYSTEMS
GC raised the issue of how the guidelines can take into account the differences between parliamentary and presidential systems. Perhaps the best we can do is to examine each the proposed guidelines closely to be sure that it is worded in such a way that it can be applied to both types of legislatures. Alternatively we may find that we have to label some guidelines “For parliamentary systems” and some “For presidential systems”
As you review the guidelines, look at them from the perspective of the system in your country. Let the group know if you find something that does not apply.
RC: Generally the guidelines as they stand work quite well for the UK Parliament (which is not very ‘typical’) – with the exception of 1.3D (since we don’t have a codified constitution in a single document). It would not be easy to implement every guideline in the level of detail we have here but that, surely, is not the point: these are guidelines which to some extent will always remain aspirational. See also 10 below
9. PARTIES AND PARTY LEADERS
There were many comments in response to the question of whether parliamentary websites should include links to parties and party leaders. SAF may have provided a useful compromise by suggesting that we recommend only links to the official websites of the parties represented in the legislature.
Comments:
CM: yes quite important as we are now seeing more inter party linkages of different parliaments , we could then have links to their bio data in 1.6 so that they can be contacted in their capacity as party leaders
EG: Regarding the question after the item [1.4.C], I agree in including party leaders, but as optional.
GC: SUGGESTED. It’s a good idea but in young democracies this is a monumental task. (In some countries there are too many political groups represented in the Parliament)
SAF: I am not too sure what this means but I think we should stick to the party leadership in Parliament and provide a link to the party website for further information.
RC: Your question about party leaders is difficult. My general sense is yes, for those parties that are represented in Parliament. But party leadership is sometimes a vague concept – would it be leaders of the parties in parliament or party leaders even when they are not in parliament?
ES: my answer is “It depends on the political system. In the UK Parliament the leader of the HM Official Opposition and all the members of the shadow cabinet have a recognised institutional role that should be (and actually is) reported in the web site. In Italy – on the contrary - we don’t have any “official opposition” and the name of the party leaders on the official web site of the Parliament would sound strange
MP: this is a good suggestion. It is good to have a list of parties, party leaders, principles, values etc and link to respective websites if available.
GS: I don’t think so. This does not belong to the work of the parliament. This info will be on the political party’s own websites.
[GC: I think it is difficult, for instance, what happen with parties that had representation on previous legislature and are not present in the current one... Should they also be considered? How do the site reflects leadership? Perhaps the Leader of the party is not a congressman/woman and the leader in congress is somebody else? Finally, I know we should andwe wish to include as much as possible in the guidelines but perhaps this is a topic to wait and see, I hope the guidelines will be revised and updated more often to address this and other pending issues]
RC: I support Shirley-Ann’s compromise
10. RECOMMENDED VERSUS OPTIONAL
Some think that everything should be recommended; others feel everything should be considered optional; still others say that some things should be recommended and some should be optional. A number of you have said that we should propose as high a standard as possible, while others are concerned that many legislatures will not be able to meet many of these recommendations. This issue is further complicated by the fact that not every guideline will apply to every legislature, even if it has the resources to implement it.
I would like to propose the following for discussion. All guidelines should be considered to be recommended if applicable under the rules and procedures of the legislature. For example, if plenary voting is by party rather than by individual member, then a guideline about the voting records of individual members would not apply to that legislature. We could have a special category for some recommendations that deal with emerging technologies that are too new for us to formulate a specific guideline but that we think merit testing and sharing of experiences. Not everyone would have the interest or resources to carry out such evaluations, but we might want to encourage it for developments that we think hold promise for parliaments.
Furthermore, we might want to encourage regional groups to suggest additions to the guidelines as they apply to the legislatures in their regions. For example, they may wish to emphasize the importance of participating in a collaborative effort to develop shared software or adjust the proposed standard on official languages to reflect circumstances in that area.
[GS: I agree and think this is a good recommendation]
RC: I am happy with Jeff’s suggestion here for reasons which I have stated several times – fundamentally that these guidelines cannot be formally policed or enforced, but they are a good idea and are therefore to be recommended, and if that helps those who want to develop parliamentary websites secure more political or financial support, so much the better! I would be happy with the two supplementary suggestions here.
'
[CLB: I would get rid of Recommended / Optional and just assume it is all recommended, as in any case this is not a compulsory activity. Each case will apply as many of these recommendations as they can / see fit.]
11. RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE LEGISLATURE
We have arranged the guidelines into six sections which can be further grouped into three broad categories: Content, Tools, and Management. Would it be useful to consider an additional way to organize or to classify the guidelines, namely by the three major responsibilities of the legislature: legislation, oversight, and representation? If so, how would we do this? Two possibilities suggest themselves: 1) assigning a tag or label to each guideline that gives its major focus (legislative, oversight, representational) or 2) a short essay at the beginning of guidelines that discusses them in the context of these three responsibilities. You may have other suggestions, or you may think that we should not pursue this idea.
[GS: Yes, it might be a good idea to make an additional way to organize the guidelines. The categories "Content, Tools and Management " is relevant for our guidelines , but not the way to organize a parliament's website. If we go for your alternative 1) this could be a help when developing websites.]
RC: Doesn’t this in reality apply only to section 2, which is (almost) in this format already? I would not want to complicate the guidelines any further.
12. SCORING
Ninoska Lopez and Erick Landaverde gave a very interesting presentation at the WePC2008 conference about their evaluation of websites in Latin American legislatures. They used a system for scoring that we might want to consider in conjunction with our guidelines.
4=Found on the Home Page
3=Found within 2 clicks
2=Found but with difficulty
1=Found but out of date
0=Not available on the website
On the other hand, this might make the guidelines too complicated for a global audience or it might be something that others should use when they apply these guidelines in comparative studies, as Ninoska and Erick did.
[GC: Comment. When we did the original methodology we came up with that evaluation scoring which has worked fine for two evaluations that we did. The small wrinkle I found relates to the "optional" category. I don't know where the place of the scoring should be, but it is necessary, perhaps we have to come up with additional information in the statistics section and include indicators as well and move this scoring to that section...]
RC: These are very interesting ideas for the evaluation of websites, but I do not think that they should be part of the guidelines themselves which (as I have said before) should be as simple as possible.
13. TIME: HOW FAR BACK IN TIME?
What is a reasonable guideline for saying how far back in time documents should be available online in digital format? For older legislatures (UK, Iceland) this is a serious issue). We might suggest everything since a specific period in history, such as since the end of World War II or a year close to it, such as 1950. Alternatively we might suggest a much shorter period such as since 2000 or for the last 5 years with a related recommendation that there be a program to digitize everything as far back as possible. This would let each legislature decide what is “possible” while still proposing a common starting year for all.
[GS: I don't think we can decide a specific year. But we can give advice and suggest that each parliament implement a digitisation program specifying which documents are to be included and which period etc.]
[GC: I agree with the comment, we shouldn't specify any period at all. We have a project with the US-Law Library of Congress and many stations around the world. The Latin American stations are incorporating legislation from the year they join the network and work in two directions: first one to keep the system with current and new legislation and second the go retrospective updating as far as they wish and as soon as they can. We have laws from as far as 1899 and 1900! The beauty of this is that smaller and less $$$ Congresses do better retrospective updating that the rich congresses, perhaps it is because they need a place to keep their information, they don't have local systems to store the info and more important, they don't have their hands tied with large obsolete systems that are not open and difficult to manipulate ]
RC: See my comments on 1.3G, 1.4A and 2.2D.