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It’s your Parliament!18. March 2010 – 17:03 by Civil College |
We have seen various examples , how national parliaments are using the data available in parliament records to display on websites.
It is unlikely to have a function to easily find and compare voting records of political groups and individual representatives. The data is from the 2004-2010 years, and obtained from the official site.
This mashup site: www.itsyourparliament.eu provides this function with a really accessible user interface and a possibility to comment.
This social responsible mashup have built and mantained by Buhl & Rasmussen without any financial support from the EU or other is a typical case, that we citizens like, admire and even encourage to follow – when somebody has the spirit, talent and skills to point out and re-engineer information holes based on public data sources.
This example highlights the importance of open standards and open data, which technically makes possible to build a services like this. Just like in the offline world, where accessibility to relevant information is a cornerstone for real participation, here, accessing data in appropriate format (open standard) is equivalent.
Empowerment subnews.
In Hungary, a success story of right defender NGO, HCLU (TASZ) is highlighting the issue of e-participation in civil campaigns.
After a journalist investigation on the planned new Hungarian Motor Race court’s financial background - to involve state aid and loan /see the story here http://www.xpatloop.com/news/63685 -sorry, but the editor has some bugs now/, – a couple of NGO’s, dealing with transparency have started to run a small scale email campaign, to get different data, related to the planned investment.
A few hundreds of emails has resulted a big scandal in the Hungarian political arena, and saved 35billion Euros for Hungary.
Writing an email, signing a petition does worth the time investment of a few minutes. Although, there might be only 1 from 1000 cases to produce such a big saving, but we have to be aware and spend some time to scan trough our facebook group messages and emails.
A few minutes every day can make us better e-and-non-e citizens!
