2. Objective

Bungeni aims to provide software tools that expedite the legislative authoring and amendment processes, the production processes and the dissemination of and access to core parliamentary documentation. It covers the entire document life-cycle of parliamentary documents. It provides tools for the drafting, revision, amendment and publishing phases of the document life-cycle and also tools to allow citizens to provide feedback, comment on issues, submit petitions and propose amendment to legislation in discussion. Bungeni will support the following parliamentary and public participation processes:

• Legislation:
• drafting and amendment of legislation (bills);
• automatic consolidation of amendment legislation on commencement;
• true 'point-in-time' searching of consolidated legislation (retrieval of the legislation relevant at a specified time point);

• Motions and Questions
• submission, revision and scheduling of Motions and Questions with support for cross-references and amendment history;

• Debate Records and Minutes

• Production of verbatim Debate Records (Hansard/Official Report) of House sessions as well as Committee proceedings with support for cross-references.

• Production of "Votes and Proceedings" report with support for cross-references;

• Calendars of Parliamentary Activities

• Production of the weekly and daily agenda of Parliamentary sittings and Committee meetings, i.e., "Programme of Parliamentary Business", "Weekly Schedule", "Order Paper" and "Daily Summary".

• Publishing of parliamentary documents through a number of different media, including web and print media

• Virtual Workspace

• Virtual Workspaces are workspaces within the portal where groups of users, e.g. members of a committee, can share documents and information and work together on common issues.

• Citizens' interactivity and participation

• Provide tools to allow citizens to participate in the legislative and oversight process by implementing functionalities like: web annotation; any documents (e.g. bill, committee reports, etc.); Blog-like discussion; Feedback on any section/page of the website; Poll and Surveys; present Petitions, etc.

Users within Parliament, including MPs, parliamentary and other support staff, may use Bungeni as a support tool for the entire range of Parliamentary works. External users, citizens, civil society organisations, institutions and private companies may use the system to access Parliamentary works and also to present contributions, opinions or feedback on specific issues of their concern (e.g. during bill amendment phase or during some committee hearings).