OpenUp has partnered with Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) and the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA) on a project, co-funded by the European Union, to develop a parliamentary dashboard that aims to improve transparency and accountability.
What are we building?
The project’s main output is a parliamentary transparency dashboard. The dashboard will serve as a standalone site where up-to-date parliamentary data, analysis and insights will be shared openly. The dashboard's main goal will be to demystify parliament and make oversight simpler. At this early stage in the project, we are working to build tools that supercharge the data we have access to through PMG and PA, all the while looking for opportunities to improve reporting and data collection in areas we feel are critical to a holistic understanding of parliament.
Where to begin?
While there are many areas this project aims to improve, from data collection and quality, to tools for assisting parliamentarians to better perform their jobs, one of the most important tasks is to help improve the public’s understanding of how parliament works and how to best engage with its members and processes to bring change to their lives and communities.
Needless to say, as a project team, we are pursuing many avenues. From fresh new ideas, to improvements to existing features, and everything in between. When assessing what to address first, there are many things to consider. Here are a few of them:
- What will create the most impact for the most citizens?
- What will create the most impact for parliamentarians?
- Where are there gaps and opportunities in what is currently offered?
- What can we do with the data we currently have?
- What could we do if we were able to improve the quality of the data we have?
- What would it take to improve the data we currently have?
With these factors in mind, we have leveraged our longstanding relationship with Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) as their technological and infrastructure partners to start exploring the rich data held on both their main site, www.pmg.org.za, as well as on their parliamentarian transparency platform, People’s Assembly (PA), www.pa.org.za.
Areas of focus
Based on a comprehensive data exploration exercise, the results of OUTA’s “Enhancing Accountability” parliamentary survey and our own ambitions for the dashboard, we have already started to test the feasibility of various ideas.
Generating and analysing committee meeting transcripts
PMG has done unbelievable work capturing and making accessible the summarised minutes of thousands of committee meetings since 2006. Augmenting these past and future minutes with word-for-word transcripts would allow for the creation of tools to extract the statements and promises made by parliamentarians and allow them to be easily indexed, searched, tracked and referenced. Successful parliamentary accountability websites such as www.kildarestreet.com use these transcripts as the backbone of their offering.
Digitised and responsive parliamentary schedules
One of the most pressing issues for parliamentarians, especially those who are part of small parties, is scheduling which parliamentary meetings they are invited to and, more importantly, which of them they will attend. Parliamentarians also have to account for which meetings they will arrange alternates for and need to consider the many overlaps that often exist in the scheduling. Developing a robust and automatically updated online calendar would make this process much easier for members of parliament. The data we would gain by scraping and digitising past schedules would also allow us to create a powerful dataset for calculating which meetings it simply was not possible for a member to attend. This is currently one of the biggest issues facing small parties and it has a direct effect on PMG’s ability to report on this data.
Making parliamentary attendance more representative and understandable
As mentioned above, small parties often face more hurdles than their more generously represented counterparts. Our data shows that, in almost all cases, the lower the overall size of a party, the higher the average committee memberships each member has. With those memberships come meetings. And, while a member of parliament may be driven to be present in, and contribute towards, every committee meeting on their schedule, the reality is that this is simply not possible. As a result, the data around attendance, which often shows low attendance for these members, does not accurately represent the realities faced in parliament. Developing a methodology for presenting attendance in a way that reflects these realities will help to highlight the often herculean efforts undertaken by smaller party members to make their voices heard in parliament. You can read more about our efforts in this area here.
Comprehensive tracking of bills through parliament
PMG has kept records on every bill that has made its way through the various chambers of parliament, as well as those that failed to do so, since 2007. The depth and granularity of this data is excellent. We believe that this data, combined with data we are looking to collect as part of this partnership, can give an even more powerful look into how policy gets passed in South Africa. Combining committee meeting transcripts will allow us to highlight the members leading the conversation around a specific policy, or thematic area. The addition of attendance data can help to see where members are prioritising their time and their voices. Analysis of where bills are spending the longest on their journey into law can help identify areas of improvement and trends.
Comprehensive member voting records on bills
Currently, record keeping around individual members' votes on bills is not captured by parliament. Only the overall vote tally is recorded. As a resource for decision making and transparency, we feel this is a critical data point for ensuring that your elected party officials are representing your best interests and taking action on the issues you care most about. As a partnership, we are hoping to be able to gather this data and make it available through both the dashboard and the PMG website.
We would love to hear from you!
These are just a few of the areas we have identified and this is just the beginning of our in-depth process of identifying need and opportunity from all parties involved in, and affected by, the parliamentary process.
If you have ideas, issues, stories or even access to data which you feel could add meaningfully to this project, we would like to hear from you! Whether you are a parliamentarian or a citizen activist, please get in touch. We will be forming a working group to share and get feedback on the outputs of our work before they go live to the public, as well as garnering as much input as possible when looking to undertake new areas of work.
Please use this link to sign up for this working group, or to simply share your ideas with us!
