4.4. Parliamentary Business

The Parliamentary Business view lists scheduled items, such as Tabled Documents, Motions, Questions and any other items that may be in the parliamentary calendar of a specific sitting or week of Parliamentary business.

The module offers the following features:

• Questions/Motions/Tabled Documents are recorded in the portal as individual documents (of differing content types) - these documents have specific "event" information associated with them - "tabling date", "publishing date" and so on. These dates are picked up by the Parliamentary Business calendar and appear in the portal calendar. [Plone]

• The system also registers scheduled events (programmed sitting days, specific regular events, ad hoc events of both plenary and committees, etc.) [Calendar] into the main "Parliamentary Business Calendar";

• the Parliamentary Business Calendar provides a list of business and provides the capability to:

• view them within the calendar according to the phase in the parliamentary cycle;

• flag using check-boxes the items to include in the Parliamentary Business (e.g. Order Paper, Schedule of Questions etc.) and provide also a facility for flagging for postponement (change to a later date) etc.;

• Note that items like Questions / Motions are not usually scheduled by time - rather 10 questions could be scheduled for a particular date. The order of the 10 questions would be determined by the speaker's office by dragging and moving the questions using a user interface [Plone]

• the Parliamentary Business Calendar allows to

• select those that have been approved by the designated organ (e.g. the House Business Committee);

• assign a predefined order or assign an arbitrary order (see above, the example of motions/questions); [Plone]

• consolidate the list into a pre-defined template to produce a draft document (e.g. Order Paper, Schedule of Questions, Weekly Parliamentary calendar,etc.) that includes the approved items in the sequence that conforms to the requirements of individual parliaments; [OpenOffice] [Plone]

• the system provides alerts for items that are due for tabling/debate in the House/Committees (e.g. Questions, Motions, etc.) e.g. through email to the relevant parties e.g. In a "Question" to the MP who presented the questions and to the Ministry that is supposed to provide the answer; [Plone]

• the system does not allow adding of any business of Parliament to the calendar that has not been recorded into the "Registry" or "Calendar". The main goal of the Calendar is to provide at a glance a view of what activities are pending today, next week, or at any time in the future. This will be used to prepare the daily and the weekly schedules for the parliament.

Dates can be assigned to not just documentary schedules (like for example, an expiry date for a motion to be moved) but also for committee meetings  (the dates that a certain committee will be meeting).

The system of assigning items to a particular date on the calendar must detect other assigned activities for that date from the parliamentary calendar and warn the user of the same. This can be done by assigning a pool of dates at the beginning of the year as "available dates" and assigning dates with events from this pool of dates.

The dates must be selected such that they fall on days when there will be a parliamentary session, and of course must have checks to warn for public and national holidays.

The calendar map can now be queried by dates and by categories, using either a "select" query for the purpose of preparing required documents like the Programme of Parliamentary Business, Weekly Schedule, Order Paper:

The system can populate the details into a document which can be used by the Clerk to prepare the different calendar/list of activities/documents to be debated.