Public Monitoring of Parliament

Hackathon problem statement
Posted 2 October 2012 by Transparency International Estonia
Monitoring the parliament
Studies have shown that the political memory of the public can be brief and the political scandals of the past fast forgotten. We would like to create a parliament monitoring website that compiles information on the decisions of MPs, their parties, and their overall work performance.
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This platform will increase civic participation in policy monitoring and prolong political memory, which will eventually lead to an improved political culture.

We wish to build an efficient parliament monitoring website that will be easy to use, affordable to set up, and reasonable to administer from a technical point of view. Although there are many sites like this in the world, we lack the technical expertise of  how to construct one efficiently. We would also require advice on the approximate cost and manpower needed for the task in order to budget adequately.

Estonia is known for its e-solutions and easy access to the web, and most people are daily Internet users. In addition, the availability of public information is good and there are no restrictions for accessing most political data and reports (for example voting statistics, legal bills, etc.) or publishing outcomes. It is therefore simply a question of creating an affordable technical solution which compiles the information onto a single site in a systematic manner and does not require a large amount of technical maintanance once the site is up and running.

The site would be aimed at the general public and society as a whole would hopefully benefit from easy access to political information. We are especially interested in increasing the involvement of youth in political monitoring. We also hope that the website will be used by the media as a source of reliable and up to date information for the purpose of investigative journalism.

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