4.1. Process

The drafting, enacting, amending and repealing of legislation is the core activity of a parliament. The processes for managing bills and other statutory instruments are typically the most complex in any Parliament. Many bills modify existing statutes, while some are written from scratch. This module supports the submission of proposed amendments and the engrossing of the approved ones into a new version of the Bill, the mark-up of Debates according to AKOMA NTOSO standards and other valuable functionalities aimed at reducing the time, cost and effort required to support the Bill life-cycle.

• Drafting and amendment environment (OpenOffice.org):

• provides the drafter a familiar word-processing interface;

• provides a "style format" interface to mark-up the document that hides from the drafter the technicalities of the XML schema;

• allows the drafter to manually format portions of a Bill if necessary; e.g. to quote an international treaty that may not match the data structures of the local jurisdiction or to include tabular data and graphics;

• generates and automatically updates section numbering of bills;

• supports automatically updating section numbering, cross-references.

• Submission of amendments (Plone-Marginalia - OpenOffice.org)

• The submission of proposed amendments (MPs) is done through a web browser interface (Plone-Marginalia) or by actually working on the bill itself in OpenOffice.org (the second case is for instances where an MP submits amendments directly to the clerk's office via email or in writing).

• Plone-Marginalia module:

• the Bill is published on the Bungeni portal and made available to be amended within a specified period of time; [OpenOffice.org] [Plone]

• Plone-Marginalia uses an HTML representation of the bill document. The original bill document is composed in OpenOffice and posted to the Bungeni Portal. Using a browser-based annotation facility, MPs (or Clerks in case the MP has submitted the amendment on paper or by e-mail) annotates the text, highlighting the portion of the text that should be "deleted", "substituted" or where a new text should be "inserted" and then entering the desired content.

• the system records the proposed amendments, where they begin and also contextual information like the relative paragraph/section;

• This recorded contextual information is used by the Bungeni OpenOffice.org editor to import the amendments into the OpenOffice.org bill document.

• Open.Office.org module:

• the Bill is published on the Bungeni portal as a downloadable OpenOffice.org document made available to be amended within a specified period of time;

• using OpenOffice.org, MPs (or Clerks in case the MP has submitted the amendment on paper or by email) may actually make the changes proposed on the actual text of the Bill using the word processor "track-changes" environment. Using "track changes" mode automatically records the context of the changes without losing the original text.

• the modified Bill OpenOffice.org document is uploaded into the system for check-in;

• the system records the proposed amendments, where they begin and also contextual information like the relative paragraph/section;

• The changes proposed by each individual MP are recorded in a separate copy of the Bill Document, since each MP starts from the point of view of the original text. I.e. if an MP proposes 10 changes to the Bill, these changes are recorded in a single document identified with the MP. The changes are also recorded in a separate database table. This output in the database is used to generate amendment list reports of different types like: the sequential order of changes, list of changes grouped by MP etc. [Amendment Tracker Application]

• Amendments submitted through Plone-Marginalia will be imported back into the OpenOffice.org bill document by an OpenOffice.org "importer" that imports Marginalia amendments into OpenOffice [This has been further described below]

• Amendments Management (Clerks):

• Amendment Lists

• amendments submitted through the web-annotation [Plone-Marginalia]

• will be extracted, and the Marginalia location markers (in terms of section name, paragraph number, number of characters, beginning and end, etc.) will be translated into OpenOffice track-changes style markers, and made available to OpenOffice.org in a format compatible with "track-changes" [Intermediate "importer" application between Plone and OpenOffice.org]

• will be made available within the OpenOffice UI to the Clerk who may fix spelling, grammar or style and applies appropriate formats and records the changes to the Bill using a familiar word-processing "track changes" functionality (the amendments will be processed in a number of iterations, each iteration presenting the amendments of one MP); [OpenOffice]

• amendments submitted through the "track-changes" OpenOffice.org module will be revised by the Clerk within OpenOffice.org who may fix spelling, grammar or style and applies appropriate formats and records the changes to the Bill using a familiar word-processing "track changes" functionality; [OpenOffice]

• changes to the documents (e.g. spelling, grammar or style revisions) are recorded by the system for accountability reasons; [OpenOffice]

• the system extracts the "changes", and stores them into an intermediate database table and generates a preliminary amendments list in the required format by extracting the "tracked changes" recorded in the database; the amendments list includes:

• the name of the MP proposing the amendment/s,

• the reference to the bill document and other contextual information that may be applicable, like Section, Paragraph, Article, etc.

• the type of change proposed (addition, deletion or substitution), and

• the actual text that is proposed to be added, deleted or substituted with (e.g. "the word 'tax' in Section 3. clause 4 is substituted with 'voluntary donation'"). [OpenOffice] generates the reports and publishes them to [Plone]

• the system stores potentially contradictory amendments proposed by different MPs to the same Bill; [Plone][OpenOffice]

• the system allows the Clerk to manually override the proposed order of the amendment list and to force the re-ordering based on ad hoc sequence.

• the system allows the Clerk to edit or annotate the proposed amendments and to register the status of the amendments (admissible/not admissible, debated or not, approved or rejected, etc); [OpenOffice]

• Engrossing of amendments

• at the end of each stage, after the debate and the votes in the Committee/Plenary the Clerk will select the approved amendments; [OpenOffice]

• the system automatically prompts/imports the approved amendment into the relevant portion of the Bill, and upon validation by the Clerk, the amendment is reflected into the Bill by using the traditional conventions to improve readability (e.g. underline format is used to indicate inserted text, while strikethrough format indicates deleted text); [OpenOffice] > [Plone]

• the system stores and makes available a "tracked changes" version (containing each accepted change of MP who proposed it as the author of that change) and a "plain" version of the bill for a new cycle of revisions. [OpenOffice][Plone]1

• The system will record all steps, phases and status of the bill process. [Plone] [Registry]

• Once the Bill Amendments have been approved, a Bill Amendment list is generated and an "amendment bill" is published, and an ANxml version of the bill is generated and committed to storage [OpenOffice][XML Repository]

The Bill process is configurable to address the different workflows and amendment cycles in different parliaments.