Bungeni-Parliamentary and Legislative Information System

There are a number of issues this project tries to addess:

1. Support parliaments in the adoption of XML and open standards. XML is the other name of “re-usability” but also potentially economy of scales and common services. Open standards and a rich semantic XML, like Akoma Ntoso will make parliaments more accessible and more accountable. XML will allow the reuse of documents in a very easy and powerful way and so will alllow civil society organisations to further add “social value” to the information and improve their watchdog role.
2· Promote an open source model to address the issues of quality and sustainability of parliamentary systems in African. We have developed a workflow-based system that seamlessly integrates the creation of documents up to their publication online, all based on open source applications. A system that, building on a common system can potentially deliver better quality to all parliaments in a sustainable fashion.
3· Most challenges encountered by parliaments are very similar in nature. The opportunities that ICTs have brought about in terms of collaboration and sharing of experience are unprecendented. The project aims at exploiting these new opportunites for sharing and collaborating by also building common services and solutions meant to both enanche the learning process as well as parliamentary efficiency and effectiveness.

Lack of resources both technical and economical resources are for sure one of the root causes of the problems. Lack of technical expertise leads to a lack of vision or to a vision that is short-sighted and focused on dealing with “emergencies” and prevents Parliaments from the luxury to foresee or implement measures that will really free parliaments to better be in charge of their own technonogical development while providing better services to their MPs and citizens.

Many parliaments have a weak IT department, and they do not have capacity to design and manage the deployment of a complex parliamentary system. Most parliaments are using old systems that are the results of layers of development that are hard to maintain in isolation.

Despite the huge opportunties of sharing and developing common services, pariaments have not been able to appreciate the opportunities of an open source development model both in terms of quality and sustainability for the development of their information systems.

We work with parliaments both national and regional, but also with institutions that are working in similar areas within the parliamentary development domain. We also work with universities from both Africa and also Europe and America. We work very closely with the Global Centre for ICTs in Parliaments, a joint initiative of UN/DESA, and the Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU) since our activities are very complementary.

Bungeni is a collaborative software development initiative based on open standards, AKOMA NTOSO (www.akomantoso.org) and open source applications that provide a solution for drafting, managing, consolidating and publishing legislative and other parliamentary documents. Akoma Ntoso, "linked hearts" in the language of the Akan people of West Africa and symbol of understanding and agreement, is a set of common XML standards that allow to exchange and reuse parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents more efficiently.

Currently it is NOT operational in any parliaments. We will begin pilot installation in June 2010 but we have many, many requests to test Bungeni, also from the Parliament of South Africa. The issue is more when we will be ready and finding parliaments that will be willing to use it.

We intend to continue the support the APKN, the development and implementation of its strategic plan since it is a unique opportunity that African Parliaments come together and agree on their priorities, and really become in charge of their capacity-building activities and common services in a way that see all parliaments as equal, regardless of their size.

We also intend to continue the deployment of Bungeni in all African parliaments to support even more functionalities and hopefully see also its adoption in parlimentary-like situations, such as regional/provincial assemblies or municipalities while at the same time seeing the development of local communities of open source developers.

We intend to continue to disseminate widely the Akoma Ntoso standards for adoption by most African Parliaments and also try to examine its reach to the other public institutions that deal with legislative processes, from the Government to the Judiciary.

We also intend to work toward a better sustainabilibity of parliamentary development assistance by ensuring that all development partners working in this area are engaged in a process that create more awareness of each other initiatives and creaty synergies to deal with the huge gap of skills, systems and resources that African parliaments have to deal in order to become more transparent and accountable.