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The findings of the World e-Parliament Report 2008 achieved by UNDESA and the Inter-Parliamentary Union on the use of information and communication technologies within 105 parliament assemblies from all over the world were presented on 25 November 2008, at the second high-level meeting of the Board of the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament.
The Report is the first one of this kind and was meant to assess the level to which information and communication technologies are used by parliaments within their activities. It also used the information exchanged during the World e-Parliament Conference 2007 and the publicly available information related to the topic.
The purpose of the report was to help "legislatures evaluate the potential benefits of ICT in supporting parliament's basic values of transparency, accessibility, accountability and effectiveness, and, at the same time, its representative, legislative and oversight functions. Its publication is intended to establish a shared knowledge base among the parliaments of the world and, most importantly, promote international dialogue on these matters." The issues tackled by the report were: the relationship between parliaments, ICT and the information society; innovation and leadership; management, planning and resources; infrastructures and services; documenting the legislative process; parliamentary websites; building a knowledge base for parliament; enhancement of the dialogue between parliaments and citizens and cooperation and coordination.
According to the report, only 10% of the parliaments from EU, Africa, Latin America, Australia and Canada use ICT to make their activities known to their citizens. "For most parliaments, our survey has documented that there is a significant gap between what is possible with ICT and what has been accomplished," said Jeffrey Griffith, one of the authors.
The study has shown that only 43% of the parliaments stated having document management systems and most of them find it difficult to keep their websites up to date and accessible to the wide public. Even when the sites displayed the texts of bills they lacked links to the relevant information.
In most cases, but not in all, the level of the ICT use by a parliament appears to be related to the level of the national income.
In Mr. Griffith's opinion, parliaments should use a similar model to Web 2.0 techniques used by the US presidential elections but also considered that in order to do that, strong political leadership, the active engagement of MPs and well-trained technical staff were necessary. "Attaining a high level of performance in the application of ICT is not only dependent on resources; it also requires strong political leadership, active engagement of members, a skilled secretariat, well-trained technical staff, and a sustained commitment to the strategic implementation of information and communication technologies in the legislative setting" says the World e-Parliament Report 2008.
During the EP conference, Mechthild Rothe, vice-president of the European Parliament said that e-parliament strategies also had to guarantee a high level of IT security concerning the privacy of the citizens' personal data. She also made a presentation of the ICT tools used by the European Parliament including RRS feeds, podcasts, online streams of plenary sessions in 23 languages. This presentation came in contrast with the statements of the representatives of the Egyptian Parliament and the Pan-African Parliament who spoke of a "great digital divide" between the developed world and African countries.
"There are technical and know-how obstacles in introducing ICT in the parliaments of the developing world, marred by ignorance, poverty and wars," said Ahmed Fathy Sorour, speaker of the Egyptian Parliament who was backed by Gertrude Mongella, President of the Pan-African Parliament. In her turn, she talked about the lack of dialogue and parliamentary representation which was one of the causes of conflicts such as the one presently going on in Congo.
The survey also shows there is willingness from parliaments to improve their use of ICT technology and their awareness of the importance of the issue.
The World e-Parliament Report 2008 also points out the "opportunities for parliaments to benefit from cooperating at the regional and global levels in the e-parliament domain. Existing and emerging parliamentary networks can sustain some of these efforts, but a worldwide dialogue is becoming increasingly essential. By offering coordinated support and training for those parliaments with fewer resources, increasing the opportunities for sharing expertise and software at a global level and providing greater access to parliamentary information resources, parliaments will be better positioned to fulfil citizens' legitimate expectations, achieve common goals and advance the principles of the World Summit on the Information Society."
Parliaments are slow in going online, study shows (25.11.2008)
http://euobserver.com/843/27175/?rk=1
World e-Parliament Report 2008 - Executive summary
http://www.ictparliament.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=vie...