Strategic Choices

Open Standards

Parliaments are major producers of data and information that is vital for the democratic well being of a country and 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 provide "Open access" digital documents need to be marked up with machine-readable descriptions that enable the addition of meaning/structure to the content,  facilitating automated information management by computers and 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.

In order to build a system that provides "real access" to parliamentary information and not just the ''display'' of information there is a need to use semantic markup languages, such as XML, to identify structural and semantical elements within the area of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents and allow  sophisticated searching, articulated retrieval and complex manipulation of information.

Bungeni is designed around open standards and as such all data generated by the system is 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).

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

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 may also encourage 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 the  technical issues of Bungeni.

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

Platform Independence

The system is operating system and hardware platform independent thus it avoids 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 Unix/Linux platforms as per the individual requirements of implementing Parliaments. Client side access is browser based so the application  can be accessed from any computer, requiring only the use of a web browser. Only for specialised features, like consolidation of amendments is access required via stand-alone multiplatform desktop clients.

Multi-language

Since the system is to be deployed across African Parliaments, it supports multiple languages in the user interface  to allow users to access the system in their natural language. It further  supports translation of the content into different languages for those parliaments with two or more official languages. More specifically, the system:

• supports English, French, Portuguese, Swahili and other languages like Arabic 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.

Collaborative Software Development

Collaborative software development is not new in the public sector arena. Iit has been utilised 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.

The Collaborative Software Development approach, while widely adopted in developed countries, is  particularly suited to Africa  because it provides the chance 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 as well as application sharing between different national administrations that can turn into better sustainability and increase quality.