Calendar/Scheduling

The Scheduling interface for scheduling sittings and assigning different parliamentary items to different sittings has been restructured. A more user friendly and feature rich calendar component is currently being used for presenting the calendar and scheduling interface to the user.

Documentation
A documentation project has been started for Bungeni - and aims to document different parts of the system. The aim is to create a 'Developers Guide' to allow new developers on Bungeni to get familiar and productive quickly. Additionally various HOWTO and FAQ documents are being created.

Performance Improvements
Various performance improvements were made to allow faster listings of content. Additionally some enhancements were made to the object relational mapper to improve multi-user support and performance. A continuous functional and integration testing model was adopted to improve quality control for the system.

Better Standards Support
Bungeni now has improved standards support for the semantic web - all Bungeni parliamentary content is accessible via RSS feeds. Members of Parliament also get a 'tracker' interface to allow them to subscribe to parliamentary items of interest. Additionally all parliamentary content is also published as a Akoma Ntoso XML document and this content can be accessed via RSS XML feeds.

Bungeni Editor

Restructuring of User Interface
The user interface of the Bungeni Editor has been restructured and made more usable and user-friendly. This involves reducing the number of input screens presented to the user - and also selectively hiding certain options from the user. The UI has also been streamlined to present a uniform user interface paradigm to the user. The second part of the UI improvement is to better integrate with the OpenOffice.org UI via native API integration for specific operating systems - there is an ongoing initiative to improve collaborative work on this front with other interested parties.

Track Changes Management
An extension module for track changes management is being added to the Editor. This will allow a clerk to review amendments submitted by members of parliament and generate parliamentary amendment reports - and finally created a merged bill document with accepted changes from the different members of parliament