Memba-O!: What next?
Lessons, learnings, and future of a platform to track Members of Parliament and the proceedings of the legislative arm of gov’t
I recently concluded my Code for Africa Innovation Fellowship, in the process building an application to track the attendance record of Members of Parliament in Sierra Leone.
In addition to just tracking attendance records, Memba-O! could do much much more in making our parliaments more open. African parliaments are increasingly being seen to only work when they need to pass bills relating to their own hefty salary and allowances. Could more public records make our representatives more accountable to us the voters?
Below are some enhancements to the platform that I believe would drive the agenda for more open parliaments.
Follow: Receive alerts on what is happening in parliament
In order to make Memba-O! more engaging, we could have users create profiles where they can subscribe to, and receive notification on the kind of parliamentary content they are interested in. This would also allow them to get tailored notifications on issues they want to keep track of.
Bots: Leverage social media networks and technologies
We could build and integrate content bots for social media platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram, to auto-serve content to thousands of subscribers that already use these established platforms on a daily basis. Customised updates on various bills or MPs/Chiefs can be pushed and other forms of engagement e.g voting on bills can be performed using this.
Connect: An online constituency of verified voters
We could create voter verified accounts. This class of users who actually actively participate in electing political leaders would then use the application to vote online on various bills and issues they are keen on. This public data can then be amplified via social media as well as partner news agencies to ensure Parliament is never out of touch with the issues of those that sent them there in the first place.
Publish: Online transcripts on parliamentary debates
It would be great to include an online record of the debates that take place in Parliament. Again, the public data, properly annotated — even visualised, would make the goings on in parliament much more open and also indicate the issues each representative is really championing over their term in office.
And when the parliamentary term is done and it is time for the reelection campaigns, half-truths and money — maybe we can look to the wealth of data generated over the years on the Memba-O! servers and use that to determine whether MP “X” deserves another shot in the big house or not.
The d|Bootcamp in Sierra Leone was based on a Code for Africa model first pioneered in Kenya in 2012 that has since been adopted across the world, with 32 bootcamps hosted in 27 countries. The Freetown event follows Code for Africa’s earlier pioneering work in Sierra Leone, where it partnered with the World Bank to help kickstart data scraperthons during a 6-week Open Data Festival 2016 in March 2016. You can read about the scraperthons here.
The World Bank’s Governance Global Practice (GGP) supports client countries to help them build capable, efficient, open, inclusive, and accountable institutions. This is critical for countries to underpin sustainable growth and is at the heart of the World Bank’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity.
Code for Africa is the continent’s largest federation of civic technology and open data laboratories, with affiliate members in 10 African countries and funded projects in a further 12 countries. CfAfrica manages the $1m/year innovateAFRICA.fund and $500,000/year impactAFRICA.fund, as well as key digital democracy resources such as openAFRICA.net and GotToVote.cc.
