How XML Can Improve Transparency and Workflows for Legislatures

This is a guest post from Andrew Mandelbaum, NDI's Senior Program Officer on the Governance team in D.C. You can follow up with Andrew on Twitter.

Recently I attended the conference “Achieving Greater Transparency in Legislatures through the Use of Open Document Standards,” hosted by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), United Nations (UN), and U.S. House of Representatives. Organized by the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament (a joint IPU-UN initiative), participants mostly consisted of ICT staff from 12 parliaments, as well as academics and representatives of international organizations. Significantly, the PMO community also had a couple of representatives in Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation and Doru Frantescu of VoteWatch.eu. Following the conference, Knowledge As Power, a Seattle-based NGO that works with government officials and citizens to facilitate online and offline engagement, hosted a legislative XML training at NDI featuring some of the creators of Akoma Ntoso, an open legislative document schema that could serve as an international standard for legislative documentation.

For the purposes of parliamentary monitoring, the release of parliamentary documents in open and structured formats, such as XML, is vital. For starters, it allows documents to be machine processable, enabling citizens to use computers to analyze parliamentary information. This lets computers do most of the math, sorting and organizing, freeing up humans to devote their brain power toward analysis and assessment of the quality of policies, legislative proposals and the rest of the important stuff. Organizations like the Sunlight Foundation, mySociety, CongresoVisible, RegardsCitoyens, Mzalendo (several more of these great organizations are addressed in a report I authored that was released last September, available here) have already demonstrated that they can be far more creative with parliamentary information than parliaments can (or necessarily should) alone. Releasing parliamentary documents in open and structured formats also facilitates searchability of this information. This transforms a collection of parliamentary documents into a body of work that encourages citizens to explore the “web of relationships” among documents and concepts. Linking related data sets lowers the barriers to information use and can help unearth important relationships that would otherwise remain hidden.

But these arguments for the utility of open document standards are not always sufficient to convince legislatures – including legislators and legislative staff – to use them. Adopting new standards may require some amount of financial investment (although Bungeni offers a ready-made suite of applications based on Akoma Ntoso) and a change of institutional culture. There are often fears that embrace of new standards and technologies may adversely impact the legislative process, workflow, traditions, and rules and procedures that have been designed over decades or even centuries of a legislature’s existence. Some legislatures may not believe they have the IT expertise to develop new documentation systems and the perceived “lack of capacity” of legislative staff may also be considered a deterrent in some instances. Although many of these concerns are overblown, the virtues of releasing parliamentary information in open document formats – such as structured XML, which is used to some extent by 13 of 26 European Union parliaments polled by IPEX, in a survey available here – are not always sufficient to convince legislatures to adopt these new formats.

So what are some other arguments to help convince legislators and legislative staff that printed documents, PDFs, Microsoft Word documents and HTML (the language used on most websites) should be accompanied by the provision of the same documents in formatted XML or another open document standard? Here are a few important points that seemed to resonate with conference participants:

1. Preservation. Legislatures often “slice and dice” information depending on the immediate need of legislators. If a legislature publishes information in an open format like XML, it will be usable long into the future through any technology, whether a computer, tablet, smartphone, etc. Interoperability means that irrespective of the innovation applied, data published in open formats will be as relevant today as it will be far off into the future. Moreover, while formats such as HTML preserve only the presentation of the document; not the structure. The ability of XML to identify that which is an “article” and that which is a “clause” links presentation of the document with the structure, which helps to ensure accuracy over the long-term.
2. Efficiency. Because open document standards allow for structured input of information (such as tagging of articles and clauses in a legislative text), these documents help structure the legislative process and cut down on human error. For the European Parliament, which has adopted an XML-based legislative markup system, this has led to dramatic reductions in the time spent drafting legislation and verifying its accuracy.  Authors no longer need to concern themselves with layout issues and all amendments are stored individually so they can be reused if not adopted. The system has also expedited the process of translating legislative texts into the 23 different official languages of the European Union and rendered access to legislation in all languages instantaneous. All of this and the system is easy to use. The European Parliament’s work also highlights another possibility for these types of applications -- inter- and intra-governmental collaboration. Standardizing document formats across different agencies, ministries, and even governments, can allow institutional staff the ability to access, process and integrate diverse data sets, strengthen the utility of information, and ultimately improve efficiency even further.
3. Cost-Effectiveness. With all the time saved by automating many of the tasks that previously required much legislative staff time, use of open document standards has potential to reap tremendous savings. Staff can dedicate greater time to adding value to the legislative process, rather than dealing with logistical challenges. Some parliaments have also reported drastic cuts to printing costs due to the shifting of some processes online.   
4. Flexibility. Open document standards can be adopted in accordance with a variety of workflow practices. Such standards do not necessarily require legislatures to overhaul existing documentation systems. Some parliaments develop legislation in XML through the addition of macros to Microsoft Word. Others develop legislation or amendments directly in XML. If an international open document standard were agreed upon (such as Akoma Ntoso, which serves as the basis for the format adopted by the Brazilian government), which would have the advantage of facilitating analysis and searchability of legislative documents across countries, legislatures that already use XML could easily (and inexpensively) transfer their information into the international standard.  
5. Ease of Use. Working with legislative documents in XML is not different for most users than for working in other formats. In Papua New Guinea, where the IT staff had little background in XML development, an XML legislative drafting system was implemented because it was a relatively low cost solution that could be highly structured to cut down on human error. Now, staff may focus on drafting legislation without having to worry about form.

Using an open document standard does not inherently lead to increased transparency. Many legislatures use XML format to enhance their internal operations while continuing to publish information in formats that are more difficult to analyze. This often forces external actors who analyze legislative documents using software to “screen scrape” information from the websites of legislatures or to manually insert it into searchable databases. Either method increases the possibility of entering inaccuracies into the data – another issue worth raising with parliaments.

Although there is no replacing the argument that open data formats facilitate citizen access to parliamentary information, these other ideas may provide additional ammunition for PMOs advocating for the release of information in open and structured formats.