The IT department of the Chamber of Deputies is developing an online platform to facilitate knowledge exchange among parliaments within the hub. The Spanish-language platform is expected to go live in the second quarter of 2019.

ICT directors from parliaments in Southern Africa were able to begin discussion on priorities to address within the hub during the 2018 World e-Parliament Conference. Parliaments from the region have started to designate correspondents to participate in the hub. This group met in Lusaka on 28 and 29 March to discuss how they will work together, including Terms of Reference, workplan, and budget, as well as operational modalities, tools and working platforms for the hub. A lively WhatsApp channel is already being used to share information between parliaments on a daily basis.

Image: Meeting of the Southern African Regional Hub, Lusaka, 27 March 2019.  © permission granted by the National Assembly of Zambia

The goal of the Inter-Parliamentary Open Data Cloud is to help people find information on bills and laws from other parliaments quickly and easily, thus enhancing the law-making process. Since December 2018, the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies has been working to improve its automated translation tool, with the help of a dataset provided to the machine-learning algorithm. Ultimately, the tools should be able to translate parliamentary documents from one language to another.

This work is done in partnership with open data experts from "G1" parliaments (that is, those already producing and publishing open data). A group has been set up on the Centre for Innovation’s Yammer channel to discuss specific issues. These exchanges will feed into an Expert Meeting hosted by the Chamber of Deputies in Brasilia from 27 to 31 May, where experts will explore options for how to connect their parliaments’ open data source systems to the Inter-Parliamentary Open Data Cloud.

The IT governance hub is an online learning platform for parliaments to support a wide development of maturity in IT governance. Since the hub’s launch at the World e-Parliament Conference in December 2018, 77 individual accesses have been granted to the IT governance platform for staff belonging to 45 organisations. Among these organisations, 11 have so far recorded information related to their organisation and their IT maturity self-assessment. Following user feedback, a new status ("To be assessed") has been introduced in the system to help differentiate the status of the IT maturity self-assessments. For access to the platform, contact [email protected].