ITWeb TV Biz speaks to Rachel Fischer, parliamentary engagement and research manager at OUTA, and Shaun Russell, product owner and head of projects at OpenUp, about ParliMeter, a civic tech dashboard built in partnership with the Parliamentary Monitoring Group to make SA’s parliamentary data visible, searchable and actionable. The conversation covers why Parliament’s information has remained effectively inaccessible despite being technically public, how raw information was transformed into usable data, and what it means for citizens, journalists and watchdogs when oversight finally becomes measurable.
South African Parliament exists for two purposes: to make the laws and to oversee the executive. In the latter role, Parliament scrutinises government departments, monitors how public money is being spent and holds ministers accountable when they don’t achieve their goals. Every portfolio committee – from water and sanitation to basic education – is supposed to do exactly this, and when it is done well, problems are identified early, budgets are interrogated and departments are forced to act. When it isn’t, the failures that South Africans experience every day – collapsing infrastructure, undelivered services and wasted public funds – go unchecked.
The challenge is that tracking whether Parliament is actually doing its oversight job has been, until now, complex. The records for meetings and minutes are fragmented across multiple formats and locations, with no one single system connecting the dots across different committees and portfolios. This has made it close to impossible for citizens, journalists or accountability organisations to see the full picture. And this is what led to the development of ParliMeter, a civic tech dashboard developed through a partnership with OUTA, OpenUp and the Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG).
ParliMeter converts years of accumulated parliamentary records into searchable, visual data that shows how South African MPs, parties and portfolio committees are performing.
Rachel Fischer, parliamentary engagement and research manager at OUTA, and Shaun Russell, product owner and head of projects at OpenUp.
“The issue,” says Shaun Russell, product owner and head of projects at OpenUp, “is that there is so much information but it hasn’t been converted into data, and without data you can’t ask the big questions about what’s actually happening.”
Parliament’s proceedings are technically open, but for organisations like OUTA, which has spent years scrutinising select parliamentary committees to hold government accountable, accessing that information in any usable form has meant manual extraction from scanned PDFs, reliance on third-party monitoring organisations and months of painstaking data cleaning.
“We could only monitor 11 portfolio committees through our own efforts,” says Rachel Fischer, parliamentary engagement and research manager at OUTA. “To then extrapolate our findings and say this is how Parliament is performing based on just 11 committees isn’t necessarily fair, as there are between 30 and 40 committees operating at any time.”
The implications for ParliMeter are significant. Budget Review and Recommendation Reports, for example, are one of the most powerful oversight tools Parliament holds. Each year, portfolio committees compile detailed analyses of departmental budgets, flag failures and make formal recommendations. What has never existed until now is a mechanism capable of tracking whether or not those mechanisms were followed up.
“We were curious about repeat issues,” says Fischer. “Year after year, the same problems are identified, and consequence management is a repeat offender across almost every committee. Now we can show where it was raised, in which committee, in which year and start applying real pressure.”
The partnership between OUTA, OpenUp and PMG has been as carefully engineered as the platform. PMG provides the data, OpenUp handles the technical architecture and OUTA drives the research and advocacy. Each partner maintains its own mandate, which is a critical balance to ensure the data remains objective and verifiable. The project is co-funded by the European Union under its Enhancing Accountability and Transparency Programme.
“We don’t believe data is neutral,” concludes Fischer. “But as far as possible, we’ve tried to make whatever we provide as objective as possible so that journalists, universities, watchdogs and citizens can take it and make their own judgments.”
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