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1. Strategic Choices

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Strategic Choices

 

Open Access and Open Standards

Open Access and Open Standards

Parliaments are major producers of data and information that is vital for the democratic wellbeing of a country and forms the lifeblood of political participation. Providing access to primary legal materials and parliamentary documents is not just a matter of providing physical or on-line access to them. In order to build a system that provides real access to parliamentary information and not just the "display" of information there is need to use structured markup, such as XML, to identify logical structures within the document. This allows for sophisticated searching, articulated retrieval and complex manipulation of information. The use of XML markup and metadata allows users to quickly identify meaningful aspects of the legislation in an understandable manner, e.g:

  • finding out from the debate records which MPs have debated on a specific issue;
  • finding out from legislation records the addressee to whom the legislation should matter;
  • finding out from legislation records the "penalty" or "consequence" of not abiding to that specific legislation;
In order to provide "Open access" digital documents need to be marked up with machine-readable descriptions that enable the addition of meaning/structure to the content, thereby facilitating automated information management by computers allowing users (MPs, the Executive, citizens, public administration and enterprises) to access and manipulate the information in the form that is most convenient to them. To achieve "Open Access" that also promotes the exchange of information and data across Africa and actually supports integration and harmonization the Bungeni Project promotes the adoption of standardized representations of data and metadata in the African Parliamentary, specifically AKOMA NTOSO - Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of African Normative Texts using Open Standards and Ontologies. The AKOMA NTOSO framework initiative was developed as an essential pre-requisite for the development of a mature Parliamentary and legislative information system. It addresses information content structure and recommends document specifications for developing Parliament information systems across Africa. AKOMA NTOSO includes:
  • A common standard for data description;
  • Mechanisms for easy citation and cross referencing;
  • A common parliamentary metadata schema;
The development of AKOMA NTOSO in the context of Bungeni was meant to provide a solid foundation for the development of Parliamentary systems in African parliaments. The aim was to provide the technical specifications based on open international standards and common document models that would allow the development of information systems that are independent of any vendor or operating system and can easily communicate with each other. AKOMA NTOSO brings together the relevant specifications under an overall framework; IT management and developers now have a single point of reference to identify the required "open access" specifications that should be followed. By adopting these specifications in the design of Bungeni we can ensure interoperability between systems that are developed on any platform and with any application software that has been developed based on AKOMA NTOSO specifications. For further detailed information please see AKOMA NTOSO www.akomantoso.org "Akoma Ntoso" (linked hearts) is the symbol used by the Akan people of West Africa to represent understanding and agreement. Likewise, AKOMA NTOSO represents common standards that provide open access to parliamentary documentation and allow Parliaments to exchange information more efficiently, like "linked hearts"

Bungeni and Open Standards

The system is designed around open standards and all data generated by the system are stored as complete human-readable XML documents to provide high value information services, facilitate access to parliamentary documentation and safeguard long term accessibility and preservation of digital parliamentary records. The use of open standards for document management and storage allows for easy exchange and aggregation of Parliamentary information in addition to reducing the time required to make the information accessible via different electronic publishing media. It also allows for greater public access to information since the information is stored in non-proprietary formats allowing for flexibility in choice of document retrieval/reading tools. All components of the system avoid the use of proprietary standards either for communication with other components or for data storage. Bungeni:
  • uses XML document models based on AKOMA NTOSO framework recommendations (see www.akomantoso.org for more information).
  • the repository uses standards-based access to repository contents. The repository contents are stored as XML documents and the repository will emulate a filesystem-like hierarchical model to store and access the XML artifacts.
By using AKOMA NTOSO compliant XML document models in combination with the standard based repository storage of the XML documents, Parliaments ensure that there is no tie-in to a particular proprietary technology, standard or vendor product safeguarding the long-term creation, storage, search and retrieval of parliamentary documents.


Open Source

Open Source

Bungeni is based on Open Source software to allow parliaments to achieve long-term ownership of the solution and exercise a degree of control over issues like support, maintenance, software obsolescence and future development. The possibility to customise Open Source according to specific needs and languages is a very important factor in the context of Africa and the many indigenous languages spoken on the continent.

This Open Source approach also encourages the participation of local African IT companies, since they have access to the system development process and the system code, and they can appreciate the opportunities that may exist for them in supporting their local legislative assemblies to adopt and adapt the product to their specific custom requirements. This in turn leads to technology transfer and building of local capacity to deal with technical issues of Bungeni.

African public administrations have began to perceive the advantages of implementing Open Source. Both continental and national authorities have begun to make open source software and open standards as the strategic choice for the development of information system for the public administration but also in order to create an indigenous local IT industry.


Collaborative Software Development

Collaborative Software Development

Collaborative software development is not new to the public sector in areas like water or energy distribution, waste management, hospitals, etc., where different administrative entities combine their efforts and share costs towards achieving a common goal. The collaborative software development approach model fosters a sustainable development by relying on collaboration and sharing of expertise and resources.

This Collaborative Software Development approach, while widely adopted in developed countries, is particularly suited to Africa because it provides the framework needed to gather the critical mass required to create synergies for high quality systems developed on sustainable foundations. It is also ideal and easily adopted because it embraces the traditional African collaborative and sharing model as the best approach to deal with paucity of resources by sharing them in order to create synergies and maximize the output.

The collaborative approach together with the use of open source applications overcomes the hurdle of license fees and allows all parliaments, big or small, rich or not, to have access to the same high quality platform of applications that can then be localised to the specific requirement of each parliament.

Through collaborative development, reinventing the same solution multiple times can be avoided thus eliminating the waste of precious resources. These resources can then be more usefully deployed to build human capacity that after all is the most strategic asset in the parliamentary organisation.

Collaborative development not only provides greater independence from IT service providers but it also enhances applications' consistency among African parliaments fostering the exchange of information; promoting learning and capacity building of Parliamentary staff.

All this will foster the "integration" and "harmonisation" agenda of Africa Union and Pan Africa Parliament since the collaboration approach promotes application sharing between different national administrations. This then addresses integration at the level of information systems by removing the multiple trans-border barriers to the exchange of information and data that are at the base of a fair and transparent economic and social integration and harmonisation of the and economic environments.

Technically the development of AKOMA NTOSO has provided a common interoperability framework for exchange of electronic information at the African level while allowing each country to then adapt to its specific requirements and traditions. Africa is both culturally and technologically ready to move on and reap the benefit of a collaborative approach.


Platform Independence

Platform Independence

The system is operating system and hardware platform independent, thus avoiding vendor lock-in (for hardware or software vendors) and also allows the successful leveraging of already existing IT resources (hardware, software and technical expertise) in parliaments.

The Parliamentary System server and client components can run on either Microsoft Windows or Linux platforms as per the individual requirements of implementing Parliaments.


Multi-language

Multi-language

Since the system is to be deployed across African Parliaments, it supports multiple languages to allow users to access the system in their natural language. The system also makes it possible to add additional languages easily using localization tools. More specifically, the system:

  • supports English, French, Portuguese and other languages using a UTF-8 character set;
  • supports the adoption of indigenous languages by allowing the various parts of the system like the User Interface and the Thesaurus to support multiple languages beyond the required set, without re-engineering the system. Particular care has been used in making sure that screen "text" is stored separately e.g. in resource strings, allowing easy identification of text to be translated for addition of different languages to the user interface.
  • provides tools to help in the translation process, and maintain coherence between the translated language and the master language sections to ensure a quick and error free translation that does not require re-formatting.

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