Electronic parliament

Role of technologies for creation of Electronic parliament

For maintenance of relationship between parliament and citizens serious efforts on deployment of the corresponding ICT and development of the legislative and regulating regulations providing a wide information access at simultaneous respect for its privacy and security are required. Use of new technologies will allow not only to show openness and transparency of work of parliaments, but also as a key state branch of the power of management will give them the chance to influence the information policy pursued in society.

Each parliament should represent accurately as these technologies will help it with achievement of ultimate goals. And this vision of ICT should rely on the political decisions made in the top-level management to become, in essence, a complex of the regulations defining strategic planning, program resources and actions and to be based on the following principles:

• achievement of transparency and openness both for parliament in general, and for its structural divisions and each member of parliament separately;

• providing universal access to parliamentary information to any citizen regardless of his personal resources or opportunities;

• creation of mechanisms for increase in responsibility of parliamentarians to the electorate;

• expansion of dialog between parliament and citizens of the country;

• security of the authorized information and privacy of personal information;

• maintenance of effective and profitable work of parliament;

• participation in global information society.

The organization structure should promote cooperation of the interested participants at all levels. At the same time it is important that all of them had motivation to joint work and considered both common interests, and specific requirements.

Deployment of ICT in parliament requires strategic planning, use of formal procedures of project management and development and development of "enterprise architecture". Strategic planning allows parliament to set priorities and to select the resources based on these priorities.

Infrastructure of services of electronic parliament

All ICT services provided with infrastructure of electronic parliament can be classified, having integrated in groups:

• the general (management of data networks, support of computers, administration of systems, application development, service, etc.);

• systems and services for members of parliament and personnel;

• networks and servers (support the intranet - and Internet communications, access to internal databases and the general data warehouses);

• the general applications (from processing of texts before management of documents and carrying out video conferences);

• specific applications (support of different types of parliamentary activity: lawmaking, representative functions, actions for supervision and control, management of knowledge bases, administrative applications);

• staff and personnel (familiarity about legislative activity and internal infrastructure of parliament, including ICT);

• the budget (the financial questions connected with implementation and maintenance of ICT in parliament).

For preparation of the documents accompanying legislative process different tools are used. These are systems for management of the offered laws and support of amendments to them. They should be adapted to requirements of specific procedures and practice of legislature to have an opportunity to define a source of the offered bill (where it arises), who can make additions to him who prepares the final version. Changes on different organizational issues can be entered into the systems.

Systems for preparation of documents and ensuring activity of committees in many legislature are considered as the working groups on development of policy. Functions on detailed consideration of bills, their discussion, review, preliminary approval or a deviation are assigned to them.

Systems for preparation of documents and ensuring activity of plenary parliamentary sessions should provide creation of the literal report of the held debate, the report on counting of votes and other different actions which happened during this parliamentary session. Systems for data acquisition about legislative activity of the government include representation and review of bills, answers to questions under the bill, formation of the final agreement, etc.

Any document management system should use certain methods of a marking of documents for the purpose of structurization of documents for increase in efficiency of their use.

One more important factor when developing legislative documents – use of so-called open standards. Their main advantages: exchange of documents; search and binding of documents, forms of submission of documents; coordination in formatting of documents; simplicity of preparation; safety; availability to citizens.

Information filling of parliamentary websites includes history, the organization, the list of procedures of legislature, information for visitors, lists of members of parliament, committees and administrative personnel, methods of contacts with them, etc., but their main advantage – the addresses of websites and e-mail allowing to get access to deputies and parliamentary library. Basic principles and standards of the organization of work of parliamentary websites: accuracy, timeliness, completeness (completeness), clarity, influence, convenience of using.

Thus, fundamental processes for implementation of the constitutional mandate by parliaments are the processes of collecting, the organization, management and preserving of information imposing high requirements to formation of parliamentary knowledge bases, to their functions and work benches. The technology basis of the parliamentary knowledge base is formed by computers, databases, networks, websites, software. Main types of parliamentary knowledge bases:

• libraries and information centers;

• Internet resources, analysis results of policy and legislation;

• consolidation and packaging of information obtained from different sources;

• archives of information^[1].

Links

"We think together" - the Russian platform for discussion of the ideas of electronic parliament

Notes