Wish List! Parliament-in-a-box Have a look at www.bungeni.org and www.parliaments.info On 7/6/07, Frederick Noronha [फ़रेदरिक नोरोनया] <fred@bytesforall.org> wrote: Basically, a whole lot of office tools that make governance accountable to the citizen. Easy-to-create websites for so many departments (opensourcecms.com is a good source). How to place online the tonnes of parliamentary information that is churned out, but seldom reaches the commonperson. All those PDF and other tools for sharing information. I think parliamentary officials need to think of transparency above every thing else. Many of us have 'representative' types of democracies, following the Westminister model,because it was British colonialism that ruled our countries. There is the assumption that the citizen would vote for his or her representative, once every five years or whatever. And the rep would then represent the citizen. What happens when the citizen doesn't have a clue as to what the representative is doing in his or her name? This may be on account of wider problems like illiteracy. Or the lack of transparency, disinterest, and the fact that the poor (the largest section in many of our countries) are too busy struggling with their lives to be able to focus on such esoteric matters. We need to look at how free software can make a real difference here. I guess it would be a mix of many existing solutions, from diverse fields. FN/ Goa, India On 06/07/07, Cecilia Matanga <cmatanga@sadcpf.org <cmatanga%40sadcpf.org>> wrote: We are planning a FOSS workshop for IT staff of Parliament and was just wondering what sort of tools are available and could be included in a Parliament-in-a- box. Also if someone has had training for Parliaments, could they share their training programme and materials with me. Regards, Cecilia Matanga ICT Officer SADC Parliamentary Forum ____________________________________________________________________________________ Need Mail bonding? Go to the Yahoo! Mail Q&A for great tips from Yahoo! Answers users. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396546091