parliamentary debates by interacting with legislators in committee hearings. Through a live chat, information can be shared in real time to assist in the questioning of ministers or specialists.
Civil society can also help parliaments "translate themselves." Mr. Ferri shared a case study of the hackathon ("hacker" marathon) that took place at the Brazilian Chamber in October 2013. Programmers spent several days transforming public data (e.g., transcripts) into visual and more user-friendly formats. One of the applications created presents congressional speeches as bubbles; the size of the bubble shows how often the topic is spoken about, or how often an individual parliamentarian speaks about a particular topic. Due to the success of this hackathon, there is now a permanent hacker space at the Chamber where legislators, parliamentary staff, and hackers continue to collaborate.
Mr. Ferri concluded that such innovative projects can cement a productive citizen network, and in essence, they allow for our representative systems to foster more participatory models of democracy.
Next, María Baron, director of the Directorio Legislativo Foundation gave a presentation (in Spanish) on the work of the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency (LANLT) made up of 22 organizations in 11
"Communication technologies are incredibly advanced. This is an enormous opportunity that all of our parliaments have and we must take advantage of it. In addition, civil society is well organized."
"If we come from the people and we are responsible to the people, we must be accountable to the people."