Online Sevices

Activity no. 3: Develop information and e-services tailored to the needs of African Parliaments

The Portal will provide access to policy-relevant information, news, and legislation relevant to African Parliaments as well as news data mining services, e-learning, etc. It will be built through cooperative efforts of Parliaments and possibly in partnership with news agencies, universities, and research institutions. The aim is to make available to Parliaments high quality information and services for policy debate and support capacity building initiatives.

The Programme will aim at the development of the following features:

• Weekly roundup of Parliamentary business of African Assemblies – The portal will aggregate on a weekly basis all the major activities in each participating Parliament. This service will depend on individual Parliaments submitting the roundup of their activities and business to the portal.

• Periodic digests/reports in plain language on relevant policy subjects and international issues - The Programme will engage partners who are respected in their fields of specialization to produce reports and digests in specific topical areas which will then be published on the portal.

• Directory of Information sources relevant to the Parliamentary Africa agenda – The portal will have a ‘yahoo-style’ directory of various information sources relevant to African Parliaments.

• Collaborative services for members/staff including mailing lists, working groups, shared repositories, and e-alert services – These services will be used by Parliamentarians (members and staff of Parliaments) for ad hoc communication online and also to provide an organized discussion forum with various topics of interest. It will be possible to form on-line working groups in specific interest areas.

Africa News Monitor (ANM) component is based on data mining technologies developed by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC). The ANM will gather on-line news reports from news portals world wide, in different languages, analyse and classify the content of the reports, aggregate the information, issue alerts and produce intuitive visual presentations of the information found.

The Africa Parliamentary Information Exchange (APEX) component is meant to improve exchange of information between the National Parliaments and the Pan Africa Parliament and among African Parliaments. National Parliaments in Africa may take part, with the degree of involvement decided by each Parliament. Each Parliament is recommended to inform the other Parliaments on its activities concerning cross-national initiatives and the recommendations of the Pan African Parliament.

The aim is to support inter-parliamentary cooperation with regard to the PAP and National Parliaments’ dialogue. The Exchange will enable the access to relevant documents and information relating to the scrutiny by National Parliaments of the activities of the Pan African Parliament. It will also facilitate communication and co-operation between the African Parliaments. APEX will also provide National Parliaments that have presently not developed Parliamentary websites with a medium for publishing relevant Parliamentary documentation in electronic form.

The e-Learning component will constitute the point of access to training for parliamentarians, managers, administrative, and technical staff. The e-learning section of the portal will serve as a learning source for all African Parliaments, and will provide access to training modules developed by other Parliaments and institutions. It will thus serve as a “warehouse” for parliamentary courseware and learning tools and services.

The Programme will promote and focus its activities on development of e-learning modules. They will be available in different languages and will also have modules specific for the different legal and parliamentary traditions. The e-training and e-learning modules are meant not just for self-teaching but also as support to traditional courses and seminars and training institutions.

For the development of courseware partnerships with specialized institutions will be facilitated. The training programmes will include among others: legislative drafting, legal analysis, markup of legislative and parliamentary document, XML, online information resources, etc.

The Programme will also support the development of interactive on-line courses from currently paper-based coursework. Much of the readily available training material is currently paper-based and is delivered using the traditional face-to-face approach which is quite restrictive when it comes to dissemination of the same training at a regional/continental level. The Programme will evaluate the possibility to digitize high quality existing paper-based training material and to develop electronic versions of the course-work which can then be distributed in an interactive format via an appropriate e-learning platform and translated in different languages.

e-Meetings/workshops are a very effective and economic alternative that do replicate the dynamic interaction of face-to-face meetings, using a rich set of online tools and capabilities. An e-meeting platform may include integrated audio and video conferencing, application sharing with mark-up, slides with animation, real-time feedback, whiteboards, instant surveys, and text chat.

The e-meeting technology is easily deployable and easy to learn and use. It makes use of readily available infrastructure such as an Internet connection and basic audio-visual equipment like microphones and a projector. It therefore makes it possible to increase the number of inter-parliamentary or institutional meetings but also have presentations from experts while drastically reducing the cost of such meetings, thus allowing a long-term sustainability of collaboration and exchanges.

The Programme will support Parliaments to leverage e-meeting technology to facilitate efficient information sharing. The Programme will create an e-meeting portal through which Members of different Parliaments can arrange for and conduct interactive meetings online. The portal will serve as a central point through which Parliamentarians can interact and meet each other to exchange information and experiences.

In the context of APNK translations in the different languages will be important as it is a major management issues for the Pan African Parliament both in terms of costs and quality and consistency of translations. The Programme will acquire a Computer Assisted Translation and Terminology Management software suite. The application will provide a server based a full-featured integrated translation environment with also translation, project management and workflow features that should dramatically shorten and facilitate the translation, reduce cost and increase quality and uniformity in the translations.

Computer Assisted Translation is as good as the translation memories it uses. The European Parliaments has agreed to make available for free their translation memories, provide technical guidance in the set up of the system and to support the training of staff of PAP translation services.

The programme will support the attendance to the EP training initiative of translators of national parliaments and the creation of Translation Memories in Swahili and Arabic, in collaboration with concerned national parliaments.