Association of Secretaries General of Parliaments
COMMUNICATION
from
Mr. Antonio CARVALHO E SILVA NETO
Director of the Projects and Management Office of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies
on
“The experience of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies on Open Parliament“
Geneva Session
October 2016
Brazil is a huge country, with a huge population pulsing with different kinds of ideas and we are represented by 513 deputies. This scenario challenges us to create diverse channels of interaction to give voice to our citizens.
All over the world, people want an improvement in the dialogue with the government and the parliament. They actually want to engage in the policymaking process and have their voice heard by the parliament. In other words, they want to take part in the public decision-making. Since then, we have intensified the actions to amplify the dialogue between the Legislative Branch and the society, turning the work in the parliament more transparent and participative.
Good practices show that there is a potential new role for modern-day legislators: they are becoming crowdsourcing facilitators. Instead of doing all the work only with their advisors, the deputies open a channel of digital communication with the people and incorporate some of their suggestions in draft bills.
Parliaments were created to be open to the people. Today, some of them are whilst some are not. New times, however, demand a new kind of openness. Some parliaments in the world are experimenting with ways of implementing this vision.
Developments in ICT mean that it is now possible to use crowdsourcing for lawmaking. There are some experimental practices in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies in this regard. For instance, the current Legislature has a portal – called e-Democracia- in which citizens can draft ongoing bills in collaboration with lawmakers through Wikilegis.
Wikilegis is a wiki tool conceived to draft legislation in a collaborative mode. People can submit specific comments or they can even suggest another wording to each part of the text. It is always under development.
The Internet Civil Rights Bill, recently approved by the Chamber of Deputies, underwent this Wikilegis process. The bill is intended to guarantee the basic principles of free internet in Brazil, such as net neutrality. It was approved by the Congress and enacted as law in April, 2014. Legislators really considered citizens’ suggestions and inserted some of them in the final draft, making specific references to participants and their contributions in the official legislative report. This tool can be freely downloaded and be used by any parliament or institution (wikilegis.labhackercd.net).
The e-Democracia portal hosts several other interactive tools, like video forums and smart polls. In the interactive committee hearings in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, citizens can ask questions and make comments in real time, which can help the debate.
We have created a version of e-Democracia for mobiles, so to make it easier to use for lawmakers and citizens, and we’re beta testing it.
In order to achieve constantly higher levels of transparency, it is not enough to simply offer information to citizens, but co-create innovative and user-friendly ways to visualize legislative information, so as can be understood and used by as many different citizens as possible. Parliaments should open their databases to full exploration by independent developers - usually hacker activists, or simply “hacktivists”. These people are technology experts who are interested in bringing governmental information to the public opinion.
We started to stimulate collaborative opportunities by inviting hacktivists to engage into two hacking marathons, in 2013 and 2014. Hackers worked in collaboration with public servants and politicians. Parliamentary officials and technicians explained how to interpret technical issues regarding the lawmaking process, public budget and how the open data was organized. Experts were invited to give lectures on subjects that were useful to hacktivists for the development of apps.
One good example of that fruitful collaboration with Hackers is the app “Retórica Parlamentar” (Parliamentary Rethoric) developed during the first Hackathon. The image below shows the information about Congressmen speeches expressed by bubbles which represent speech subjects made in the Brazilian Chamber.
And bigger bubbles mean that that subject is more frequently used by congressmen in their speeches, like the economy, the most popular theme. Clicking on the biggest bubble shows who the most frequent speakers are. The larger the faces the more frequently they speak about the subject. So this is a simple, more enjoyable and more user-friendly manner to express the same information.
After the 2013 hackathon, a permanent hackerspace was set up in the Chamber of Deputies at the beginning of 2014, following a suggestion which was given by the hackers themselves. In this hacker laboratory, called Labhacker, citizens can freely come and contribute with projects and ideas for innovations in transparency and participation in legislative affairs. We have used this space for other meetings, like hackdays, presentations organized by hackers, and discussion with lawmakers and parliamentary officials about innovations.
One of the main aims of the Hacker Laboratory is to foster collaboration across unities within the Chamber, as well as with external partners from government and civil society, so to promote transparency and participation. The interaction with hackers has provided the Chamber invaluable feedback on errors of its open databases, so they could be corrected. Design thinking is applied through constants usability tests of prototypes, so that citizens can collaborate in shaping better participation tools and help us devise new possibilities.
We have just developed a new application. Its called, Infoleg. The idea is to enhance the transparency of the Chamber to the society by the use of mobile devices. It aims to present information about Deputies and monitor the House Floor and the Committee sessions. It is available on App Store and Google Play, and so for we have had more 20.000 downloads.
What is coming next? The Brazilian Chamber of Deputies has been working on a new prototype. It is the application “Câmara Transparente”. It aims to provide services, related to transparency, which are already available on our website. Deputies and citizens will be able to access information about: legislative activities, oversight and control and representation.
Soon, people will able to access other subjects such as: parliamentary quotas, human resources and budget.
These are some of the initiatives that we are creating in order to offer the Brazilian citizens the opportunity to effectively participate in the legislative process.