CC image courtesy of PhilippN
A website hosting details of South African members of parliament (MPs) alongside information and blogs on the functioning of the country’s legislature is busy adding new MPs to the platform following the country’s elections ahead of a marketing push aimed at boosting usage.
People’s Assembly was founded in February this year through a collaboration between the Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) and mySociety with funding from the Indigo Trust, and is attracting almost 10,000 unique visitors per month currently.
Features include a Rep Locator, which allows citizens to find out who their representatives are and how they can be contacted, individual profiles of MPS and blog posts and articles on the functioning of parliament.
The team behind the site is currently in the process of adding data for new MPs after the country’s elections earlier this month, which saw the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party retain its parliamentary majority, before launching a marketing campaign aimed at increasing awareness and usage.
Executive director Gaile Fullard and monitor and projects manager Rashaad Alli told HumanIPO the website obtained most of its data from the parliament and PMG websites through scraping, though sometimes errors had to be fixed manually.
“As parliament’s website is not up-to-date, we do have problems with items such as parliamentary committee membership and the Hansard – which we have to manually correct,” they said. “Constituency office information is obtained from the political parties. The PMG website tracks committee meetings and the individual comments of each MP are aggregated and appear on the MP’s profile. Likewise, his or her plenary comments.”
They said the reaction from the media and non-government organisations (NGOs) has been positive, and it was now hoped a marketing campaign can boost public use. A “small selection” of MPs have also welcome the idea.
“The website was launched when the Fourth Parliament was about to end and MPs were embarking on their election campaigns. The initiative will be properly marketed to the MPs once the Fifth Parliament is up and running,” they said.
The team said technology has allowed for the creation digital tools to provide access to information, institutions and decision makers with greater interactivity., while there has been a growing realisation that citizens are essential to democratic governance.
“While there are huge disparities between first and third world countries, there is a high level of mobile phone penetration in African countries – this narrows the digital divide and promotes general ICT literacy,” Fullard and Alli said.
“Parliamentary monitoring organisations have an important role in promoting participatory democracy, as well as increasing transparency and accountability in government. We hope to bridge that disconnect between citizens and their representatives and hold government institutions to account.”
In order to increase usage, People’s Assembly has been distributing brochures, courting the media and using Twitter and Facebook, but it still plans to form strategic relationships with other organisations to market the website and have the website featured as a relevant link on more government websites.
