At the meeting Achieving Greater Transparency in Legislatures through the Use of Open Document Standards, held at the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC at the end of February 2012, participants raised two important issues: how can Parliaments turn the current financial crisis and subsequent reduced budgets into an opportunity to improve the efficiency of the parliamentary processes by applying XML-based technologies? What benefits can end users derive from the implementation of such processes, whether inside or outside a parliament's administration?

XML, as an open semantic standard for documents, offers several advantages that have been already pointed out in many occasions, like clear separation of content and presentation, easy reuse of documents, better support of search engines and multichannel dissemination. However, much still need to be done to evaluate the benefits deriving from the implementation of an XML-based chain not from the publication/dissemination point of view, but rather from the perspective of supporting the production of legislative content inside parliaments' administrations.

Anticipating the adoption of XML to the very first phases of the law-making process can in fact reinforce the rigour in law-drafting, reduce the subsequent transformations, limit mistakes and improve the overall document quality. Moreover, working with structured information since the beginning of the process makes it possible to easily treat that same information with IT tools during the production process, without additional transformations and risks of loosing content.

Nevertheless, Parliaments will not be able to address exhaustively the question of the benefits deriving by the introduction of XML-based chain if the positive effects provided by the adoption of such technologies are not analysed in depth by those Parliaments that had the opportunity to be the pioneers in this field.

Purpose of the workshop

The overall goal of the workshop was to promote the adoption and implementation of XML-based technologies by Parliaments around the world. To achieve this objective, the workshop focused on:

• Improving the quality of the debate among parliaments that have already undertaken activities towards the use of XML-based tools for their production chain
• Sharing the experience of more advanced parliaments in this field with other interested in setting up XML-based production chains and use this knowledge to offer practical support to the parliaments of new and emerging democracies.
• Demonstrating practical users’ cases along with evaluations of the benefits that justified the investments

During the workshop, evidences of the benefits were provided by presenting both the IT tools deployed to support the legislative chain within an XML-based context as well as the end users experiences. These examples, together with presentations from business stakeholders, attempted to demonstrate that the efforts to move towards an XML-based chain can justify the investment to be made.

At the same time, since some improvements can be directly measured while others are less quantifiable, such as quality improvements, the Workshop sought to identify common benchmarks for further evaluations.

 

Structure of the workshop

The workshop was structured over two days. The first day focused on the current implementations of XML-based tools within parliamentary administrations with  practical presentations by participating delegations. The second day opened with some end users cases, trying to explore the perception of direct and indirect benefits provided by such implementations. Finally, the afternoon of the second day focused on interventions related to the open source world and possible initiatives related to XML implementation in parliamentary settings.

 

Expected Results

The ambition of the Workshop was to prove that introducing XML-based production chains into the law-making process can bring important benefits that justify the initial investment and positively impact on the quality of the process.

 

Organizers

The meeting was organized by the European Parliament’s Office for Promotion of Parliamentary Democracy  (OPPD) and Directorate General for Innovation and Technological Support, in association with the UN/IPU’s Global Centre for ICT in Parliament.

For all questions regarding logistical aspects, please contact Ms Helen Collins  

Email: helen.collins@europarl.europa.eu  / Tel: +32 2 284 2754

For all aspects regarding the agenda, please contact Mr Claudio Fabiani

Email: claudio.fabiani@europarl.europa.eu  / Tel: +32 2 284 4778