Advocacy (Monitoring) by CSOs

Advocacy (Monitoring) by CSOs#

User Story – In a Nutshell#

As an advocacy/public policy manager at a civil society organisation, I want to monitor certain political topics and bills at all federal levels continuously, comprehensively and efficiently, in order to participate more effectively in political processes.

Status Quo and Problem#

In Switzerland the most important political decisions are not only made on the national but also on the cantonal and municipal level (26 cantons, 461 municipalities). Currently, individual interests have more influence on law-making than those of a majority of society or the planet i.e. civil society organisations (CSOs) are not as influential as corporate lobbyists.[1] Two reasons for this, both connecting to money, are asymmetries in power and resources (time and money). A resource-intensive (time for manual labor or license fees for commercial monitoring tools) part of advocacy is the monitoring of political issues through their lifecycles and at all federal levels. The reason for this is that parliamentary data in Switzerland is currently not harmonized and easily accessible and it is not possible without a vast amount of resources to build (monitoring) tools based on this data.[2]

Use Case#

        flowchart TB
    Parl1["Most Parliaments
        (Data Providers)"] -- Web Crawling --> OPD["OpenParlData.ch
        (Data Intermediary)"]
    Parl2["Some Parliaments
        (Data Providers)"] -- API --> OPD
    Parties["3rd Party Data Providers"] -. API .-> OPD & Tool["Tool Providers 
        (Data Users)"]
    OPD -- API --> Tool & CSO2@{ label: "CSO 2
    (Data User)" }
    Tool -- GUI --> CSO1["CSO 1 
        (End User)"]
    CSO1 <-. share/collaborate .-> CSO2
    Tool -. API (enriched data) .-> OPD

    style OPD stroke:#BBDEFB,fill:transparent
    style Parties stroke-width:2px,stroke-dasharray: 2

OpenParlData.ch imports, cleans, harmonizes and openly publishes data from Swiss parliaments. It currently offers public data on political actors, parliamentary proceedings, decrees, consultations, votes and more from 78 parliaments. Directly or more likely indirectly (via tool) using our API continuously supplying harmonized legislative data, advocacy/public policy managers at CSOs can more effectively and efficiently [3]…

  • automatically monitor bills/items of business (”Geschäfte”) relating to a certain topic at all federal levels,

  • follow a bill (including related bills[4]) through its lifecycle including parliamentary commissions,[5]

  • easily integrate monitoring data into their advocacy processes, and thereby…

  • create insights and more effectively participate[6] in political processes and advocate for the public interest.

Furthermore, allied CSOs can share enriched data and insights and coordinate their activities. Tool providers can share enriched data (e.g. topic classification) with our data infrastructure.

Current scale#

Our project partner Adorable Squid is currently developing a political monitoring tool for CSOs (transParliament) using our data infrastructure. It is currently in a prototype state. Our project partners Glue, Polsan and the Swiss Association of Municipalities with their monitoring tool POLITmonitor as well as Fortae with their consultation tool Demokratis.ch will switch to our API in the upcoming months. The former furthermore plan a comprehensive update of POLITmonitor. Our partner DemoSquare is currently evaluating the integration of our cantonal and municipal data.[7]

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