September 1st, 2009 in Projects, Tools, good practice by depp
In this second article about Openparlamento.it, we’ll introduce the index of activity, an index we created to measure and compare, from a strtictly quantitative point of view, the activities of the elected officials in the Parliament.
The index has been publicly discussed in one of the openpolis mailing lists for some time.
What follows is a summary of the criteria used to craft it and how it was used to generate a report on the activity in the Italian Parliament, presented to the press in June.
The index is built out of official parliamentary acts, published in the parliamentary web sites (https://www.senato.it and https://www.camera.it) and gathered on our servers. It is based on:
- the number of acts an official presents and wether as first signer, co-signer or simple supporter,
- the number of votings an official takes part to,
- the number of statements an official releases, during assembly or committee meetings.
As far as members of the government are concerned, only those acts presented as members of the parliament are taken into account. This means that the index of activity for these officials will be comparatively lower than that of other officials that do not have government charges.
Also, institutional charges, like the president or vice-president of Il Senato or La Camera and the leaders of parliamentary groups, do have other tasks and are able to take only limited part in the standard parliamentary activities.
The formula used to compute the parliamentary index takes into account these factors using the following table of weights.
| Type of act |
First signer
|
Co-signer
|
Supporter
|
Assembly Statement
|
Committee Statement
|
Bill
|
10
|
3
|
6
|
1
|
1
|
| Motion |
6
|
2
|
NA
|
1
|
NA
|
Written question
|
3
|
1
|
NA
|
1
|
NA
|
Question
|
3
|
1
|
NA
|
1
|
NA
|
Question with answer in Committee
|
3
|
1
|
NA
|
NA
|
1
|
The weights take into account the difference between presenting an act as first-signer, co-signing an act presented by someone else, and being a simple supporter of the act.
Also, different weights are given to different types of act, somehow following their political relevance. For example a question has weight lower than a motion, that has itself a lower weight than a law design, because the amount of effective and political work spent to prepare such different types of acts is comparatively different.
Of course, the quality of the work done varies widely for each single act in an unmeasurable way. Much of the activities depend on the content of the act itself rather than on its type and much of the political work an official performs is done out of the monitored meetings in assemblies or commissions that we’re able to consider for the computation.
That is the weakness of the methodology behind the construction of the index, that makes it suitable for a general, quantitative overview on the activities of the elected officials and can not, in any context, be regarded as a measure of the quality of the work.
On the 16th of June a report named “Camere aperte” (Open chambers) was presented to the press by the Civic Observatory on Italian Parliament.
The report contained different rankings of the parliament officials, ranging from the most (and least) present, to the most (and least) active, and it was based on data from the openparlamento.it web site.
It received a lot of attention from the italian press and spurred an array of angry reactions from those officials emerging in the “least” rankings, but it was also welcome by other officials and by institutions in general, and it will be presented again in few months.
July 21st, 2009 in Projects by depp
Rome, July 2009
After promoting different projects on e-democracy and e-partecipation in Italy (openpolis.it, voisietequi.it), the openpolis association, a spin off of the DEPP association, has officially presented to the public a new web application wholly dedicated to the monitoring of the italian Parliament: https://www.openparlamento.it.
This is the first of a series of three articles in which we describe some of the relevant features of the web application.
In this first article we describe the application, its vision and why, in our opinion, it can help build a base of informed citizenship and improve the democratic process.
The other two articles will focus on two particular instruments of the application, discussing various interesting aspects related to them that brought quite an array of reactions from the public.
openparlamento.it is a rather complex web application, where citizens can gather detailed informations on the proceedings of the acts presented by the elected officials at national level.
It allows one to follow an act in its path across the two perfectly symmetrical chambers (La Camera and Il Senato), from its presentation as a proposal, to its final approval.
It tracks all the votations, highlighting rebel voters. It tracks who presented an act, and wether as a first-signer or a co-signer. It also tracks speeches of officials on given acts.
Access to textual documents related to an act is easy and documents can be emended by users online, using an innovative shared comments system (eMend), that allows discussions on a particular act to take place.
Users can describe the acts, using their own words, in a wiki subsystem, acts are ratable and commentable, too.
All acts are tagged with consistent arguments by an editorial board, and that allows to know what’s going on and who’s doing what in relation to a subject.
An event-handling subsystem allows the generation of news. Whenever an act is presented, it moves towards approval or refusal, a votation takes place, someone gives a speech or anything worth noticing happens, news are generated. A dedicated web page and a customized daily e-mail, containing just the news related to those acts, politicians or arguments monitored by the user, allows him/her to follow almost in real time what’s going on.
Monitoring arguments is the most remarkable activity. Being time- and resources-consuming it is also not for free, though. A payment model is being discussed with the users during this free-demo phase, and we hope to come to reasonable commercial terms.
openparlamento.it sits on the shoulders of giants, those giants being TheyWorkForYou and OpenCongress.
The idea of materializing all the principles regarding the transparency of elected officials’ activities into a live web site was what we grabbed from those projects.
In Italy, public scrutiny is invoked as a distant and impossible principle. It is left to the official media and it is usually strongly biased, especially when it comes to the political arena.
We wanted to build a place on the web where citizens could inform themselves, controlling the activities of elected officials in the national parliament.
We asked ourselves: what if citizens could comment, rate and describe with their own words the acts presented by their representatives at La Camera and Il Senato? What if people could vote these acts so you can compare elected officials’ and citizens’ votes in the same context?
More than that, we wanted to give the public a tool that could help to understand a bit better what’s being done in the parliament and who’s doing what, and to possibly jump in the process, too. Uncensored.
That is one of the pillars of powerful lobbying: to know the real connections between the informations.
And that’s what we wanted the project to be: just a block of a series of tools that allowed for an improved relation between the represented and the representatives.
to be continued …
eDemocracy, transparency
