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Exploring Open Parliament Initiatives in Ecuador Through Technology

Abstract:

A healthy dialogue between civil society and governments stems from meaningful communication and understanding of political data. Visualization tools have the potential to support this. To contribute to a growing Digital Civics agenda in the Global South, we built an interactive visualization prototype that enables open-ended analysis of legislative roll-call vote data from the Ecuadorian parliament; political actors were interviewed and shown this tool to explore future opportunities for open parliament technologies. This work serves as motivation for the design of open parliament technologies which ought to (i) provide stories and narratives about the parliament's and legislators' political history, (ii) support the understanding of how parliamentary bills and resolutions become law, and (iii) grapple with the socio-technical considerations that platforms must undergo in order to make citizen participation an incremental journey rather than a fixed destination.