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Software Applications

Activity no. 4: Deploy, develop and support applications based on open source and open standards

The UN/DESA Project’s "Strengthening Parliaments' Information System in Africa" developed Bungeni – an end-to-end suite of applications that provides a world-leading solution for drafting, managing, consolidating and publishing legislative and other parliamentary documents. Bungeni wants to address the growing and challenging demands of increasing the efficiency of parliamentary activities and at the same time making Parliaments more open and accessible to citizens, virtually allowing them “inside the Parliament” or Bungeni, the Kiswahili word for “inside the Parliament”.

Bungeni is built upon key pillars of open source, multi-platform, open standards, and multilingualism, which makes it applicable in the very different African contexts. It uses a unique approach that gives legislative drafters a familiar word-processing experience using the familiar Open-Office word-processing package for document creation, but ultimately stores the documentary information as platform independent structured XML files. For more information on Bungeni please see www.bungeni.org

Some of the tasks which will be undertaken for deployment of the Bungeni Parliamentary Information System include:

• Customise the system to the specific requirements of each Parliament. The Bungeni solution offers a variety of features and functionalities. However, a certain degree of customization may be required in order to meet the specific requirements of each parliament.

• Deploy the system and train users. The user training strategy will adopt a ‘train the trainer’ approach, giving African Parliaments and their local partners the opportunity to acquire the domain knowledge. It will cover maintenance issues, backup, restore and troubleshooting, managing and configuring the system, installing the system and using the system training modules.

• Manage the updating and evolution of Bungeni system

For the optimal automation of Parliamentary operations through Information Systems, there are additional modules outside of the core Parliamentary Information System that need to be deployed. The Programme will support Parliaments to acquire and implement these modules/applications, which include:

• “Speech to text” application for Parliamentary debate transcription: In many African Parliaments, the manual process of transcription of Parliamentary debates is tedious and long. To improve public access to Parliamentary debates and proceedings, the Programme will support Parliaments in acquiring a specialised “Speech to text” application which will provide semi-automatic transcription services (only for the available languages e.g. English and French).

• Media (audio/video) streaming application for publicly availing recorded Parliamentary proceedings, To enable Parliaments exploit the great potential of media streaming technologies, the Programme will support the acquisition of media streaming service. By using these technologies, it is possible to provide citizens and MPs with chronological archives of chamber and committee meetings as useful reference material.

• Integrated Library System and Digital Repository System. To support African Parliaments in providing quick and efficient library services, the programme will identify a suitable open source Library Management System and a Digital Repository for deployment in Parliaments of Africa to be able to manage digital materials and publications effectively to provide greater visibility and accessibility to them. The programme will provide support to the Parliaments in implementing the systems.

“Open access” requires that the information and the search and retrieval of data is structured in a way that allows users (MPs, the Executive, citizens, public administration and enterprises) to access and manipulate the information in the form that is most convenient to them.

AKOMA NTOSO framework , developed by the UN/DESA Project “Strengthening Parliaments' Information Systems in Africa” is an enabling framework for the effective access to and exchange of machine readable parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents such as legislation, debate record, judgments etc. AKOMA NTOSO aims standardize simple, technology-neutral representations of Parliamentary Documents. More information can be found on www.akomantoso.org

In order to promote the adoption and management of AKOMA NTOSO the Programme will: 

• Develop the technical implementation guidelines for the AKOMA NTOSO framework for open access.

• Provide support to the Parliaments and other national relevant institutions (e.g. Attorney General offices and Judiciaries) for the adoption of AKOMA NTOSO

• Establish the AKOMA NTOSO Working Group, under the aegis of the Pan African Parliament based in South Africa. 

The “Legislative Drafting Guidelines for Africa”, developed by “Strengthening Parliaments' Information Systems in Africa” under the aegis of PAP, represent an unique opportunity to support the harmonisation effort of legislation in Africa and common services. The Programme will promote the dissemination, adoption and capacity building activities related to Legislative Drafting Guidelines and mark up of legal documents in parliaments, government drafting bodies and judiciaries. More information can be found on drafting.akomantoso.org

Promoting the adoption of Africa-wide shared standards for legal drafting and XML mark up of legal documents in all relevant public administration bodies will not only contribute the accessibility and understandability of laws in Africa, and facilitate integration and harmonisation of legislation in the African context, but will also allow all stakeholders to exploit the huge potential of ICTs in the legal domain for  disseminating information and granting access without the barriers of time or space.

The programme will also support the development of Africa Parliamentary Topic Map to address the twin problems of finding information and sharing knowledge in the parliamentary domain. The aim is to develop a common and multilingual topic map that aims at enhancing the efficiency of searching for information across languages. The Topic Map will be building on the experience of Eurovoc  - a multilingual thesaurus based on the European Parliament’s Eurovoc, thesaurus in use in more than 25 parliaments for more than 20 years. 

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