“Guess Who’s Coming to TCamp” is a mini-series we started last year to introduce some of the faces you'll see at TransparencyCamp. With only a few more weeks left until TCamp 2013, we will check in with some of the international guests and TransparencyCamp scholars joining us in Washington, DC on May 4 and 5.

For the last two years, we invited a number of advocates, journalists, policy makers, developers and others from all over the world to join us for TCamp and a series of informal meetings in the days before TransparencyCamp. This year, we opened up the process for participants outside the U.S. and invited people to join us through an online application process. We had an overwhelming response to the program with over 400 applicants. Thanks to our generous funders, we will welcome 23 people from a wide range of countries. Here`s our map:

This week, let’s say hello to: Oluseun Onigbinde from Nigeria, Juha Yrjola from Finland and Pamela Mutale Kapekele from Zambia. Make sure you register for TransparencyCamp so you, too, can meet open government advocates from across the globe.

Oluseun Onigbinde, Open Data Analyst, Nigeria

An Ashoka Fellow who spent years in the financial sector providing critical analysis of budgets and strategic research to help banks perform better, Oluseun decided “it was time to take a risk and apply these same principles to building a better country.” But instead of providing analysis to managers of government, he thought the key is to provide this budget analysis to the general public.

His start-up, BudgIT aims to bridge a gulf of ignorance and uses tools such as mobile phone, internet and town hall forums to strengthen budget access. BudgIT wants to retell the Nigerian budget and public data in a finer detail across every literacy span and stimulate citizens interests around public data and hence trigger discussions towards a better governance.

One of the greatest challenges Oluseun faces these days is meeting the expectations of excited citizens about government data, especially at the subnational level where information is highly protected. Oluseun hopes to learn new practices and approaches at TCamp that he can instill into his immediate pan-African expansion plans.

Juha Yrjola, Developer and Openness Evangelist, Finland

Juha is one of the main developers of the Parliamentary Monitoring Organization for Finland called Kansan muisti ("People's Memory") and a Code for Europe Fellow for the City of Helsinki helping the city build services for citizens (and civil servants) with agile and open-source methods.

Juha collects data from different sources including the official parliamentary website and MPs' social media feeds and provides the public with analyses based on combining the parliament voting data with the MPs' election promises. Their analysis received overwhelmingly positive responses and attention in mainstream Finnish media and by now kansanmuisti.fi has more Facebook fans than many of the major political parties in Finland.

Juha also contributed to the development of a social media feed aggregator for municipality election candidates and a service that tracked how the candidates disclosed their campaign funding data before the elections.

Juha has both practical and more philosophical expectations from TCamp. Our Finnish guest is keen on cooperating with different parliamentary monitoring organizations so that they could pool more resources instead of duplicating work and find other folks working with municipal data to share experiences. He also plans to be involved in more abstract discussions around preventing vote buying in representational democracies or privacy concerns in the age of openness.

Pamela Mutale Kapekele, Blogger, Zambia 

Besides managing her shift from more traditional journalism to serious blogging through Bantu Watch, an Ushahidi-based technology platform in Zambia, Pamela also sits on the board of the Zambia Media Women Association.

A few years ago, she took part in a Thomson Reuters Foundation course on financial and economic reporting, one of a series being run for African journalists in cooperation with the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad). Norad has especially wanted to focus on the money that goes missing from developing countries – not just through graft and crime but also through the accounting tactics of big companies in their effort to pay as little tax as possible in the places where they operate.

The session March 2011 Johannesburg gave Pamela the idea for an international story "that was discussed in the European Parliament and lead to action against a mining giant that operates in my country, Zambia," she writes.

In 2011, Pamela teamed up with seven other journalists to create the Bantu Watch, an online platform that provides channels  for citizens and civil society to use mobile phone, social media and other internet-based channels to report on electoral offences such as intimidation, hate speech, vote buying, violence, tension, polling clerk bias and voting misinformation. Pamela believes that their website contributed to the peaceful transition in Zambia and now she is planning to organize data camps in newsrooms across Zambia to help journalists effectively report and monitor government activities.

We hope you can make it to TCamp with Oluseun, Juha and Pamela!

At the end of TransparencyCamp 2012, a bunch of us shared goals and projects that we would commit to do in the week(s), month(s), and year following TCamp. Both at Camp and in this recap blog post, I made a commitment to publish all the documentation we’ve created about how to run a transparency unconference online.

Just a few months later, we've done just that. I'm happy to report that as of today, there's a new tab up on TransparencyCamp website: Our "How-To Guide." There, you can learn more about what makes TransparencyCamp TransparencyCamp and learn from our experience in unconference organizing. Whether you're a veteran or first-time event organizer, interested in bringing TCamp to your home country or just curious to take a peek behind the curtain, this guide should prove useful to you.

Let us know what you think -- and any other insights into Camp you'd like us to share.

And, for those of you wondering, news to come about TransparencyCamp 2013 soon.

This Monday will bring the start of the "PMO Leaders Conference on Parliamentary Transparency and Networking" here in Washington, DC. Among the topics at the three-day conference of global parliamentary monitoring organization leaders will be a discussion on a parliamentary transparency pledge. The pledge's purpose is to stimulate discussion among PMOs and, eventually, between PMOs and parliaments, on issues of parliamentary transparency.

All of us who are organizing the conference welcome comments on the draft document, which is included below. One of my colleagues at NDI wrote a fantastic summary of the issues the pledge seeks to address, which I've stolen copied posted below as well. (Please feel encouraged to raise issues in the comments section of the blogpost.)

Summary of Issues Addressed by the Pledge

• Promoting a Culture of Transparency: As the people’s institution, parliamentary information belongs to the public. However, parliamentary information can be used by citizens most effectively only if in the context of a broader culture of transparency. Parliament has a duty to enact legislation that promotes a culture of transparency, including laws that encourage a vibrant civil society. Moreover, parliament has a duty to ensure the effective implementation of laws that guarantee transparency of government and parliamentary information through its oversight role and by providing legal remedies that allow for citizens to enforce their rights to access public information. Parliament also must facilitate the participation and engagement of citizens and civil society in government by supporting civic education, by cooperating with parliamentary monitoring organizations and by respecting the rights of citizens to complete, accurate, and timely parliamentary information.
• Making Parliamentary Information Transparent: Parliament must adopt policies that ensure full transparency of parliamentary information. Parliamentary information includes information generated throughout the legislative process, including the text of introduced legislation and amendments, information on the scheduling and the legislative process, information on committee and plenary votes and parliamentary debate, and all other information that forms a part of the parliamentary record. In addition, parliament must provide information on the management and administration of parliament, contact information and other basic information on parliamentary members and staff; information on the activities and affairs of members of parliament, including information on political financing and asset disclosures of members of parliament.
• Making Parliamentary Information Easily Accessible: Not only must make parliamentary information public, it must also ensure that the information is broadly accessible to all citizens through multiple channels. Physical access to parliament must be provided to all citizens, in particular to the media and civil society, free of charge, in all national languages and without discrimination based on disability.
• Enabling Electronic, Online Access and Analysis of Parliamentary Information: Parliamentary websites are essential means of communication with citizens even in societies with limited Internet penetration, by facilitating access to parliamentary information by civil society, which can further disseminate information to interested citizens. Parliamentary information shall be released online in structured, open data formats that allow citizens analyze and reuse this information using the full range of technology tools. Data shall be hyperlinked and tagged with appropriate metadata to facilitate searchability. Privacy of information by citizen users of parliamentary websites shall also be respected. Parliament has a duty to continually improve its online presence by drawing on good practices, by adopting the use of non-proprietary tools for search and analysis, and by exploring the use of interactive technology to foster the ability of citizens to participate in parliamentary processes.

The Parliamentary Transparency Pledge

I. PREAMBLE

WHEREAS a strong, accessible and responsive parliament is “a – or even the – institutional key to democratization” because of its constitutional responsibilities of enacting legislation, overseeing executive policy implementation and representing citizen interests and;

WHEREAS transparency of parliamentary information enables parliamentarians to engage constituents in discussions of policy issues, informs and educates citizens about the work of parliament, provides citizens with access to the information necessary to provide input into the legislative process, permits citizens to hold parliamentarians to account and ensures that citizen interests and democratic aspirations are represented;

WHEREAS the rights of citizens to participate in governance and to access government information, including parliamentary information, are recognized as fundamental components of established international human rights frameworks, including in Articles 19 and 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in Articles 19 and 25 of the United Nations’ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights;

WHEREAS transparency of parliamentary information is recognized as an essential element of a democratic parliament as reflected in emerging international benchmarks and norms for democratic parliaments developed by the international parliamentary community, including the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, Southern African Development Community Parliamentary Forum, Assemblée parlementaire de la Francophonie, and the Parliamentary Confederation of the Americas;

WHEREAS the need for greater parliamentary transparency is complemented by the need for open government and whereas 51 governments are currently working together as part of the Open Government Partnership, currently chaired by Brazil and the United Kingdom, to share concrete commitments in national action plans to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, repeal laws that hinder access to government information, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance;

WHEREAS the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, through the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament, have laid a strong foundation for parliamentary transparency in publishing Guidelines for Parliamentary Websites in 2009, which describes the types of parliamentary information that should be made available on parliamentary websites, and whereas numerous parliaments, inter-parliamentary institutions and civic organizations have worked to develop common principles of open government data; and

WHEREAS a growing number of civil society parliamentary monitoring and support organizations seek to play a meaningful and collaborative role in strengthening the democratic accountability of parliaments and require access parliamentary information to play this role effectively, and whereas there are numerous precedents for strong collaboration between parliaments and PMOs that can inform efforts for greater transparency of parliamentary information in other countries;

THEREFORE, the undersigned parliamentary monitoring and support organizations call on parliaments to pledge to work toward full adherence to the following principles of parliamentary transparency:

II. PROMOTING A CULTURE OF TRANSPARENCY

1. Public Ownership of Parliamentary Information: Parliamentary information belongs to the public; any exceptions or limitations to this principle shall be narrowly defined by law.

2. Promoting a Culture of Transparency through Legislation: Parliament has a duty to enact legislation, as well as internal rules of procedure and codes of conduct, that foster an enabling environment that recognizes and protects the public’s right to government and parliamentary information, promotes a culture of open government, safeguards freedom of expression and assembly, and provides opportunities for engagement by civil society and citizens in the legislative process.

3. Promoting a Culture of Transparency through Oversight: In fulfilling its oversight function on behalf of citizens, parliament shall ensure that laws ensuring government transparency are implemented effectively, that the government acts in a fully transparent manner, and that government also works to promote a culture of transparency.

4. Supporting Civic Education: Parliament has a responsibility to actively promote civic education. Civic education includes engaging the public, and particularly youth, in discussions that promote understanding of the role of parliament, its rules and operational procedures, its work and functions, and the duties of parliamentarians. It also includes providing detailed parliamentary information, as well as summaries and plain language explanations of parliamentary work that can be used effectively by citizens of mixed educational and life experiences.

5. Encouraging Citizen Participation: Transparency of parliamentary information is not an end in itself. Parliament has a duty to actively engage citizens and civil society in parliamentary processes and decision-making, in order to effectively represent citizens and to give effect to the right of citizens to petition their government.

6. Encouraging a Vibrant Civil Society: Parliament has a duty to support the development and maintenance of an active, engaged, vibrant civil society and to ensure that civil society organizations are able to operate freely and without restriction.

7. Enabling Effective Parliamentary Monitoring: Parliament shall recognize the right and duty of civil society, media, and the general public to monitor parliament and parliamentarians. Parliament shall encourage dialogue and consultations between parliament and civil society organizations that monitor parliament in order to improve the quality of monitoring efforts and to reduce barriers in accessing parliamentary information.

8. Sharing Good Practice: Parliament shall actively participate in international and regional exchanges of good practice with other parliaments and with civil society organizations to increase transparency of parliamentary information, improve the use of information and communication technology, and strengthen adherence to democratic principles.

9. Ensuring Legal Recourse: Parliament shall enact legislation to ensure that citizens have effective access to legal or judicial recourse in instances where citizens’ access to government or parliamentary information is in dispute.

10. Providing Complete Information: Parliamentary information available to the public shall be as complete as possible, reflecting the entirety of parliamentary action, subject only to narrowly defined exceptions specified by law.

1. Providing Information in a Timely Manner: Data about matters under consideration in parliament shall be provided to the public in a timely manner. As a general rule, information shall be provided in real time, and to the extent that doing so is impossible, parliamentary information shall be released as quickly as it is collected.

2. Ensuring the Accuracy of Information: Parliament shall retain authoritative copies and ensure that the data it releases to the public is accurate.

III. MAKING PARLIAMENTARY INFORMATION TRANSPARENT

1. Adopting Policies on Parliamentary Transparency: Parliament shall adopt policies that ensure the routine and proactive publication and dissemination of parliamentary information, including policies regarding the formats in which this information will be published. Parliamentary transparency policies shall be publicly available and shall specify terms for periodic review of this policy to take advantage of technological innovations and evolving good practices. Where parliament may not have the capacity to publish comprehensive parliamentary information, civil society shall be encouraged to develop a partnership with parliament to assure broad public access to parliamentary information.

2. Providing Information on Parliamentary Roles and Functions: Parliament shall make available information about its constitutional role, its structure, its functions, its rules and its workflow.

3. Providing Information on Members of Parliament: Parliaments shall provide sufficient and regularly updated information, on the Internet and through other means, for citizens to understand a member’s credentials, party affiliation, roles in parliament, policy positions, identities of personal staff, and any other information members wish to divulge about themselves and their credentials. Working contact information for members of parliament shall also be available to the public.

4. Providing Information on Parliamentary Staff and Parliamentary Administration: Parliament shall make available information about its administrative functioning and the structure of parliamentary staff that manage and administer parliamentary processes . This shall include publishing working contact information for parliamentary staff engaged in providing citizens access to parliamentary information.

5. Informing Citizens regarding the Parliamentary Agenda: Documentation relating to the scheduling of parliamentary business (e.g., the session calendar, information regarding scheduled votes, the order of business , the schedule for committee hearings, etc.) shall be provided to the public. Except in rare instances involving urgent legislation, parliament shall provide sufficient advance notice to allow the public and civil society to provide input to members regarding the items under consideration.

6. Informing and Engaging Citizens on Draft Legislation: Draft legislation shall be made public and published upon its introduction. Recognizing the need for citizens to be fully informed regarding laws under consideration, parliament shall seek to provide the public with analysis and background information to encourage broad understanding of policy discussions.

7. Publishing Records of Committee Proceedings: Reports of committee proceedings, including documents created and received, testimony of witnesses at public hearings, transcripts, and records of committee actions shall promptly be made public. In general, committee reports shall be made public before related legislation is tabled in plenary.

20. Recording Parliamentary Votes: To ensure accountability to their constituents for their voting behavior, parliament shall seek to minimize the use of voice voting in plenary and shall use roll call or electronic voting in most cases, maintaining and making available to the public a record of the individual voting behavior of members of parliament in plenary and in committees.

1. Publishing a Hansard, Transcripts, or Records of Plenary Proceedings: Parliament shall create, maintain and publish readily accessible records of its plenary proceedings, preferably in the form of audio or video recordings, hosted online in a permanent location, and in the form of a written transcript of parliamentary debate.

2. Publishing Reports made to Parliament: All reports requested or required to be submitted to the parliament, its offices, or committees, shall be made public in their entirety, except in narrowly defined circumstances identified by law.

3. Providing Budget Information: Parliament has a responsibility to make public comprehensive, detailed information about the national budget and expenditures, including past, current, and projected revenues and expenditures, and information regarding the parliament’s own budget, including information about its own budget execution, bids and contracts. This information should be made public in its entirety, along with plain language summaries, explanations or reports that help promote citizen understanding of this complex information.

4. Disclosing Assets and Information on Political Finance: Parliament shall make available sufficient information to allow citizens to make judgments regarding the integrity and probity of individual members of parliament, including asset disclosures by members, data on campaign contributions and political finance, and information about interactions with lobbyists.

5. Disclosing Information on Conflicts of Interest and Ethical Conduct: Parliament shall disclose information necessary to protect against actual or perceived conflicts of interest. Parliament shall also make public information on the results of parliamentary investigations into ethical behavior, conflicts of interest and possible corruption of members of parliament.

6. Providing Access to Historical Information: Where feasible, parliamentary information for prior sessions shall be digitized and made available to the public electronically. Digital information shall be retained in perpetuity and shall continue to be made available to the public. To the extent a parliament cannot digitize and make available its own information, it shall work with outside organizations to facilitate public dissemination of parliamentary information without restriction. Parliament shall provide the public access to a parliamentary library in order to allow members of parliament and the public the ability to access historical parliamentary information.

IV. MAKING PARLIAMENTARY INFORMATION EASILY ACCESSIBLE

1. Ensuring Accessibility of Parliament through Multiple Channels: Parliaments shall provide access to information about its work through multiple channels; including but not limited to first-person observation through physical access to proceedings, print media, radio and television broadcast, and through the use of the internet and mobile device technology.

2. Ensuring Physical Access to Parliament: Parliament and its plenary sessions shall be physically accessible and open to all citizens, including persons with disabilities, researchers, members of civil society, and journalists, subject only to demonstrable public safety and space limitations. Where space constraints exist, the existence of a media and public gallery for citizens to observe plenary sessions is important as a symbol of parliamentary transparency, with any restrictions on access narrowly defined, publicly available, and non-discriminatory.

3. Guaranteeing Access by the Media: Parliament shall ensure that the media and independent observers are given full access to parliamentary proceedings; the criteria and process for providing media access shall be defined and publicly available.

4. Using Live Broadcasts and Streaming Video: Efforts shall be made to develop mechanisms that ensure real-time access by citizens to parliamentary proceedings through broadcast of legislative proceedings using radio, television and the internet.

5. Guaranteeing Accessibility throughout the Country: To the extent possible, access to parliamentary information shall not be restricted by geographic barriers. Although the use of parliamentary websites facilitates access to parliamentary information without geographic restriction, in countries where internet access and usage is limited, parliaments shall seek other means of ensuring public access to parliamentary information outside of the capital city, throughout the country.

6. Using Plain Language: Parliament shall ensure that legal or technical language does not serve as a barrier to citizens seeking to access parliamentary information. Parliament has a duty to develop plain language summaries and other simple tools to make parliamentary information readily available and understandable to a broad range of citizens.

7. Using Multiple National or Working Languages: Where the constitution or parliamentary rules provide for the use of multiple national or working languages in parliament, parliament shall make every reasonable effort to provide for the simultaneous interpretation of proceedings and rapid translation of the parliamentary record.

8. Ensuring Free Access: Parliamentary information shall be available to citizens for access and reuse free of charge. In limited circumstances where it may be necessary to charge a fee to recover costs in collecting or copying information that is not publicly available in the normal course of business, any charge shall not exceed the additional marginal cost of distribution to that citizen calculated at market or actual rate, whichever is less, and shall not be used for the purpose of deterring requests for information.

"Guess Who's Coming to TCamp12" is a mini-series we started to introduce some of the faces that you'll see at TCamp, something we hope will be useful to attendees and non-attendees alike. So far we've highlighted Beth Sebian, Matej Kurian, Michael Mulley, Maria Baron, Marko Rakar, and three awesome Transparency Camp Scholars. Today we are proud to introduce Dondon Parafina, of the Philippines, and Wong Aung, a Burmese activist.

Redempto Santander Parafina ("Dondon") is the Network Coordinator of the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability in East Asia and the Pacific (ANSA-EAP), a regional program of the Ateneo School of Government and the World Bank Institute. His work covers Cambodia, Indonesia, Mongolia, and the Philippines. His work on social accountability is advancing ideas and practices in various fields, particularly procurement, ICT, youth involvement, and the education, health, and public works sectors. He is currently spearheading an education initiative called Check My School, a blended online and offline platform for information access and citizen feedback.

Prior to joining ANSA-EAP, Dondon spent five years as the coordinator of Government Watch, or G-Watch, an anti-corruption program at the Ateneo School of Government in the Philippines. While there, he coordinated various citizen participation initiatives, including nationwide programs monitoring textbook procurement and delivery and school building construction.

Dondon has been active with the Coalition Against Corruption, the Transparency and Accountability Network, DPWH's Integrity Development Committee, the Procurement Transparency Group, and several youth groups including the Boy-scouts and Rotary Youth. He answered a few questions about his work.

Where did the idea for CheckMySchool come from? I conceptualized and designed the Check My School initiative based on my relatively long experience in monitoring the education sector in the Philippines. Many of our initiatives monitor individual items (e.g. textbooks, school buildings) and particular procedural concerns like procurement. I felt the need for Check My School to provide a more comprehensive look at the education services and hopefully link them with the higher development outcome of learning. So the initiative covers various info sets, such as enrollment, personnel (teaching and non-teaching, rooms (academic and non-academic), textbooks, seats, computers, toilets, budget, and national test results. The other trigger for introducing the Check My School is to take advantage of technology. There are now 27 million Filipino Facebook users and we also wanted to tap into the civic energies of these netizens. What kind of impact has your work had? After one year of implementation, we made some impact in issue resolution through very quick actions on practical issues that were submitted through the platform. There's a case of classroom repair worth P4.8 million (US$113k)  that was continued immediately because of CMS feedback. Textbooks were also replenished   toilets were renovated, and another toilet was donated by alumni group in direct response to CMS report.  I think the other impact is that we are now starting to replicate the initiative. We have started the south-south knowledge exchange with Indonesia for their adaptation of Check My School. Other countries also expressed interest, like Kenya, Moldova and Papua New Guinea.

Wong Aung is the International Campaign Adviser at the Shwe Gas Movement in Burma. The movement seeks to raise awareness about the social, economic, and environmental impacts of the Shwe Gas Project in and outside of Burma through first hand research and community organization. The Shwe Gas Project involves the exploitation of underwater natural gas deposits off the coast of western Burma's Arakan State. Burma's military junta and a consortium of Indian and Korean corporations made a deal to explore and develop these deposits. These fields are expected to hold one of the largest gas yields in Southeast Asia and could represent the Burmese government's largest single source of income.

What kind of communities do you work with and what does your day to day work entail? In his role as International Campaign advisor Wong Aung works in exile to bring the voices of project affected communities to the regional and international level, as well as back into Burma through advocacy to political actors and mainstream Burmese. What would you like conference attendees to understand about the Shwe Gas Project? The Shwe Gas Project is a massive resource extraction and infrastructure development which has been planned and implemented by the former military junta (and their corporate partners) with absolutely no input from or thought for the local people. The project will generate huge revenues (US$29 billion over 30 years) for the Burmese state but under the current system there is no transparency in how these revenues are spent. The Shwe Gas Movement is demanding the project to be suspended until community rights and the environment are protected, affected peoples share in benefit ,  and transparency and accountability mechanisms are in place. What's the best place to go to find out more about your work and other transparency initiatives in Burma? Visit www.shwe.org  and www.earthright.org to find out more about the work of the Shwe Gas Movement as well as Extractive sectors transparency and justice in Burma.

Join us at TransparencyCamp April 28th and 29th just outside of Washington, DC to meet Maria, Marko and other folks -- inside and out of government -- who are working to making our government more open, accountable, and transparent. Register today at http://transparencycamp.org -- and hurry! Space is limited.

"Guess Who's Coming to TCamp12" is a mini-series we started to introduce some of the faces that you'll see at TCamp, something we hope will be useful to attendees and non-attendees alike. Last week we highlighted Beth Sebian, Matej Kurian, Michael Mulley, and three awesome Transparency Camp Scholars. We're kicking this week off with Maria Baron, out of Argentina, and Marko Rakar, from Croatia.

Maria Baron is the Executive Director at Fundacion Directorio Legislativo, a nonpartisan organization in Argentina that promotes the strengthening of legislative branches of government and the consolidation of the democratic system through dialogue, transparency, and access to public information. Maria has a Master's degree in International Relations from Bologna University, Italy and is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the National University of San Martin, Argentina. She is also a journalist and has worked as numerous organizations in Argentina and abroad that work to reduce corruption and enforce ethical behavior. A Fulbright-APSA Congressional Fellow, she has published seven editions of Directorio Legislativo: Who are our legislators and how they represent us, in addition to numerous other publications about legislative transparency. She took the time to answer a few questions about her work and transparency in Argentina.

 Can you tell us how you initially got involved in legislative transparency? In 1997 I interned at a Washington DC based organization called Witness for Peace that worked to promote changes in the US forign policy and the international institutions, towards some countries in Latin America. We went to Congress talk to members about the situation in the region. So they provided me with a little book with information on who's who in Congress, members' bio, staff information, and so on. When I came back to Argentina I decided to replicate that initiative in my own Congress when at the time Congress' websites only contained the list of the members. And surprisingly, one member appeared both as a representative and as a Senator! I had no organization to back me, so I started fundraising by myself. I found one potential donor that told me, "if you can get all the members to agree to give you all the information, I'll pay for half of the printing".I worked for 8 months non stop every day. And the last two months I slept one every to nights. I gathered all the information and used my savings to pay for the other half.  When the book was printed I put them in a big back pack and knocked on every door on every office in Congress. I sold all of them. That's how I started. What kind of effects has the publication of Directorio Legislativo had? * CULTURE of SECRECY: We have battled for legislators' finantial statements to become public. We created a volunteer network of 100 to call senators and in four months the president of the senate issued an internal resolution to allow for the publicity. In the lower house we litigated and the issue went up to the Supreme Court. We have litigated against Congress four other times on access to public documents and won them all. What's the best place to go to find out more about your work and other transparency initiatives in Argentina? The best place is our website www.directoriolegislativo.org. We also coordinate the Latin American Network for legislative transparency www.transparencialegislativa.org. And there are other organizations in Argentina that work on transparency and have a lot of work done: Asociación por los Derechos Civiles www.adc.org.ar Poder Ciudadano www.poderciudadano.org Cippec www.cippec.org  

Marko Rakar is one of Croatia's leading political bloggers and transparency activists. He was recently in the news for publishing a massive, easily searchable database of all public procurement data for government spending in Croatia dating back to July 1, 2009. His NGO, vjetrenjaca.org (Windmill), has been dubbed the Croation "wikileaks". He has a history of exposing fraud and abuse in the Croatian political system. In 2009 he published a searchable database of Croatian voters, shining a light on the fact that there are more registered voters than citizens in the country. He was kind enough to answer a couple of questions about his work.

What's your relationship been like with the Croatian government?  We had a change of government in late december last year and while previous one was actively harrasing me (including arresting at one point) this one actually asked for a number of inputs from me on different subjects; in the last few months I have been hired on some government data projects, I was also choosen to be one of the participants in Openg Government Partnership steering committe (for croatian "chapter" of OGP). It is far early to tell how will this develop or if we will have some results to show, but with new government it is a completely different (and so far positive) story. What work of yours do you think has had the most impact? as for the impact; we have done a number of different projects, some of those were clearly with educational value (for example visualisation of croatian state budget, or "state budget calculator" which allowed anyone to create their own version of state budget) and they were all very successfull and seen and used by hundreds of thousands of people (in a country of 4.5 mil people), we have done some actions which might be characterized as investigative journalism although they are also based on collecting and processing data - few weeks back we have published (so far secret) intinerary of governments plane which we reconstructed from (foreign) public sources. But the largest impact was voters list project simply because it affects everyone in the country and now everyone knows how the elections are manipulated and it is only a question of how to resolve this issue (which is not so simple). Our latest project with procurement was top story of the week in Croatia and we got unbeliveable press time for it, but it is too early to tell what will the true effect be in the future, but we know for a fact that journalists AND public prosecutors office use it on a daily basis.

Join us at TransparencyCamp April 28th and 29th just outside of Washington, DC to meet Maria, Marko and other folks -- inside and out of government -- who are working to making our government more open, accountable, and transparent. Register today at http://transparencycamp.org -- and hurry! Space is limited.

"Guess Who's Coming to TCamp12" is a mini-series we started to introduce some of the faces that you'll see at TCamp, something we hope will be useful to attendees and non-attendees alike. So far this week we've highlighted Ohio advocate Beth Sebian, Transparency International Slovakia's Matej Kurian, and three awesome Transparency Camp Scholars. Today, we are happy to present Michael Mulley, who is working to open up the Canadian Parliament.

Michael founded Open Parliament Canada on the premise that "Parliament's goings-on are important." The goal is to make public Parliamentary information "meaningfully public," meaning easily shareable and machine-readable. Mulley Recently moved to Montreal from New York "in search of better bagels". In New York he studied computer science and linguistics while working in tech consulting. He currently operates a web development operation called Only Connect.

Michael answered some questions on his passion for open government, challenges he faced while building Open Parliament Canada, and the response his site as received. He also shared some advice for others thinking of setting up a parliamentary monitoring site in their own country

    Has the Canadian Parliament noticed your work? Do you have any interaction with them? Parliament as an institution has certainly noticed my work, and I've had some friendly and useful conversations with IT staff. I won't pretend that I haven't encountered lots of bureaucratic delay and frustration, and I can't claim that I led to their opening data, but I since I started Open Parliament our House of Commons -- whose internal data architecture is actually surprisingly good -- has started releasing a fair of bit of data in XML. Lots of Members of Parliament use the site too. They're generally happy with it -- after all, my goal is to get people to listen to what they're saying -- and I've useful discussions with a few. You list some other websites as inspirations for OpenParliament.ca. What inspired you to be inspired by them? What made you want to get involved in open government? Honestly? An engineer's frustration at things that are more complicated than they should be. I saw TheyWorkForYou and thought it was just a self-evidently good idea. It didn't exist in Canada yet -- there was a nice vote-tracking site, but nothing with TheyWorkForYou's focus on user-friendliness and MPs' actual words -- and I thought it should, so I made it. Were there any particularly interesting challenges you faced in gathering the information you present on the website? Is it entirely automated? It's entirely automated (though that no-cell-coverage camping trip two weeks after launch was still pretty stressful!). I now have access to a bunch of XML feeds, but when I launched a couple of years ago everything was web scrapers, which are a source of constant boring challenges that make you realize that virtually every initial assumption you made was incorrect. For example, I assumed -- quite reasonably! -- that times were on a 24-hour clock. Turns out that when a session extends past midnight, the clock just keeps ticking past 24: if MPs have to work late, so does time. We had a filibuster recently which took us past 80 o'clock. More fun has been trying to find ways to analyze the information -- finding haiku hidden in the debates, using simple Bayesian stats to find out which words and phrases our different parties are fond of. You described the Canadian open data portal as having "relatively little in the way of visible results, a pale shadow of...the US and the UK". What's the best thing the Canadian government could do for its open data program? Give it resources and dedicated team with a mandate to both educate within the government and interact with the outside world. The open data program was revealed fully-formed, with a site full of PR fluff and a license that barred using data in any way that might make the government look bad. The license was fixed soon enough, and a few promising things have come out of the program. But the pattern of changes coming only via ministerial press releases has continued. I have no idea who's actually running the open data program or what their plans are, and the combination of a not-particularly-useful site and a complete lack of outreach or communication makes me worry that our government will be able to say "Nobody used our open data, so we eliminated the program for cost savings." Is there any advice you'd give to people thinking of doing a parliamentary monitoring website in their own country? Look at  similar sites elsewhere and read mySociety's brilliant guide on creating such a site. Parliamentary-monitoring sites as a genre are about eight years old now, and have reached the point where most developed countries -- and several developing ones! -- have a good, widely-used site. I think lots of us are interested in ways of reusing each others' work, and that's one of the things I'm really looking forward to discussing at TCamp. And, finally: fun and informality are powerful weapons that you can use and your government largely can't. This doesn't mean cheapening politics or introducing bias; it means making things user-friendly and enjoying yourself.

Join us at TransparencyCamp April 28th and 29th just outside of Washington, DC to meet Michael and other folks -- inside and out of government -- who are working to making our government more open, accountable, and transparent. Register today at http://transparencycamp.org -- and hurry! Space is limited.

“Guess Who’s Coming to TCamp12” is an mini-series we started to introduce some of the faces you'll see at TCamp, something we hope will be useful to attendees and non-attendees alike. This week, we’ve highlighted Ohio advocate, Beth Sebian and Transparency International Slovakia’s Matej Kurian. Today, we bring you a few of the TransparencyCamp Scholars.

The TransparencyCamp Scholarship program was started as part of our 2011 Camp. It’s an application driven process that provides partial travel stipends for folks from around the country (and the world) to come to Washington, DC to join us for Camp. This year, we accepted 10 Scholars -- a mix of long-time and first-time opengov activists, developers, journalists, and thinkers. Like last year, we’ll do a round-up of the full list of Scholars post-Camp, but first, here’s a sneak peek at these awesome peeps:

Yvette Cabrera

Berkeley, California

Currently, Yvette interns with the Oakland Food Policy Council, blogging on topics like aquaponics, food policy, interesting events, and supporting the Council’s efforts in building partnerships and identifying key regional allies and decision-makers.

Think food policy has nothing to do with transparency? Think again. From the data held by government agencies like EPA, FDA, and USDA to having access to the meetings and records of government boards charged with setting local policy, those invested in food distribution, quality, and regulation have plenty of concerns that overlap with us transparency geeks. When asked why Yvette in particular wants to come to TransparencyCamp, she answers:

I want to learn about building transparency in the government on a national and local level in order to create a food system that is healthy and just for everybody. Transparency to me means efficiency and increased citizen participation in decision-making, and I think that is the only logical way to improving the current food system that we have here in the U.S.

Nuno Moniz

Porto, Portugal

Nuno is a civic hacker whose interests in open civic data have led him to work on a variety of different projects. His first was to open up the Portuguese State Budget, making it available in JSON. Using this information and the Open Knowledge Foundation’s “Bubble Tree” (a way to display interactive visualizations of spending data), Nuno went on to create visualizations for both the Portuguese 2012 State Budget and the Azorean 2012 Autonomous Region Budget.

Currently, Nuno is sinking his teeth into the meat of Portuguese legislative data. “For the last 6 months (and for the next 6 months) I've been working on my Master's Thesis: in a nutshell, I'm transforming three years of Portuguese Legislation's .PDFs into open data.” Knowing that the TransparencyCamp community is full of civic hackers from all over the world who work on legislative data and others who can provide help insight on the use and governing of this information, Nuno hopes to lead a session at TCamp about his work:

"Opening the Portuguese Legislation: What useful information lies in the documents?" was the name of the session I proposed [on Google Moderator]. As I said before, I've been working for the last months on an open legislation project. The objective of this session, besides sharing the project, its development status, and the "bumps along the way", would be to think what more information lies in the legislation texts. Which and what entities are present in those texts? People, Organizations? What do we gain by processing, discovering and interlinking that information and not just publishing its text? How could mapping that information add more transparency in the legislative process? Questions for the debate, and at the end, I hope, new and better ideas. :)

Dan Schneiderman

Rochester, New York

Dan says that he got into the world of opengov-ery because of his “passion for playing with big data and seeing how it can be used to help people.” Building off his experience at TCamp 2011, he hopes that TCamp 2012 will be an opportunity to explore new possibilities for future projects and how he can become involved with the transparency movement after he graduates.

To kick off this exploration, Dan plans to brings to TCamp the fruits of an independent study of government data he’s been working on using the javascript library D3. His study mashes up information from Data.gov, the Open States API, and a large collection (340,000!) of tweets relating to Super Tuesday that he scraped. Want to learn more? Find Dan’s session at TransparencyCamp.

Join us at TransparencyCamp April 28th and 29th just outside of Washington, DC to meet Matej and other folks -- inside and out of government -- who are working to making our government more open, accountable, and transparent. Register today at http://transparencycamp.org -- and hurry! Space is limited.

Let the countdown to TransparencyCamp 2012 continue with another edition of "Guess Who's Coming to TCamp12". Through this mini-series we will introduce some of the faces you'll see at TCamp, something we hope will be helpful for attendees and a  provide a neat window into the festivities for those who can't make it. Yesterday, we introduced you to Beth Sebian from Cleveland, Ohio. Today we are excited to highlight one of our international attendees!

Matej Kurian is the program coordinator at Transparency International Slovakia. One of his recent projects is Open Contract Portal, developed by TI Slovakia and Fair Play Alliance, aimed at increasing transparency and accountability in public spending by empowering citizens. Matej has an MA in Political Science from the Central European University. His self-reported specialties include accountability, transparency, corruption, open government, data-driven projects, and non-democratic regimes. Before joining Transparency International Slovakia, he had internships at A.T. Kearney and the Slovak Governance Institute.

TI Slovakia's procurement and contracts websites are among the best in the world. Matej was kind enough to answer a few questions about their features, design, and impact:

 What kinds of features do your procurement and contracts sites have that others don't? Most of the procurement sites provide little more than a sophisticated list of contracts. We're trying to add an analytical layer to data, essentially empowering users to run their own tests.  Open Contract Portal is to my best knowledge first of its kind in the world, I am not aware of any other country that mandates publishing of public contracts online.   What made these sites possible, from the government and from TI Slovakia? Government did not play any role in the projects, save for the regulatory framework that mandates that original data that we scrape have to published. Open Society Foundations funded both of the projects, Siemens Integrity Initiative funded Procurement Portal.   While TI Slovakia did not have any previous experience with building and managing online portals, our expertise in procurement and data-driven analysis helped in designing the portal.    Has this had any policy impact, or has it made the impact of procurement policies clearer? While non-specialist use of the portals is still quite low, specialist groups made use of them. For example, based on the portal data Transparency argued for mandatory use of electronic reverse auctions, or had been able to compare pre-electoral spending of governments. Both of the portals contributed to debate on quality of the public data.

Join us at TransparencyCamp April 28th and 29th just outside of Washington, DC to meet Matej and other folks -- inside and out of government -- who are working to making our government more open, accountable, and transparent. Register today at http://transparencycamp.org -- and hurry! Space is limited.