Agencia de Gobierno Electrónico y Sociedad de la Información y del Conocimiento

15 - Citizen Observatory on parliamentary activity

Brief description of the commitment: The commitment consists of developing a digital platform that allows citizens to monitor and oversee parliamentary activity. This tool will be integrated into the institutional website and will focus on visualizing open data through interactive dashboards, themed tags, icons, and statistical graphics that facilitate its understanding and use without requiring specialized technical or legal knowledge from the user.

Organizations leading the commitment: House of Representatives and Senate - Parliament - Legislative Branch.

Supporting institution/organization: Administrative Commission - Legislative Branch

Responsible for the commitment: Emiliano Metediera, Secretary-Rapporteur of the House of Representatives. Contact: emetediera@diputados.gub.uy. Juan Pedro Lista, Director General of the Senate. Contact: jlista@parlamento.gub.uy

Responsible for monitoring: Soledad Figueredo, Director of the Management Improvement Division of the House of Representatives. Contact: sfigueredo@diputados.gub.uy, Caterina Di Salvatore, IT Advisor of the Senate. Contact: cdisalvatore@parlamento.gub.uy

Stakeholders

1. Government: Agesic.
2. Civil Society: CAinfo, Data Uruguay, public and private universities.
3. Other actors (Parliament, private sector, etc.): Not applicable.

Implementation period: September 2025 – December 2027.

Problem definition

What problem does the commitment intend to address?

The aim is to minimize inequality in access to information and incorporate innovation, with a modern digital solution for citizen monitoring and oversight of parliamentary activity. This will guarantee public access to a greater amount of data in open, updated, and reusable formats.

Despite institutional efforts to increase transparency, data is not becoming a real tool for citizens. Currently, those who take advantage of open data are researchers, journalists, or technicians. However, if data is not becoming a real tool for citizens, the goal of active transparency and effective accountability is not being met.

What are the causes of the problem?

The problem stems from the gap between publishing data and making it understandable. Many people lack the skills to search, filter, or download datasets with complex tabular structures (CSV, JSON). Even if data is "open", it becomes excessively technical if there are no user-friendly visualization tools that help citizens answer basic questions such as: What do legislators do? What issues do they address? How do they vote? How much do they work?

Description of the commitment

What has been done so far to solve the problem?

The institutional website of the House of Representatives was unified to help improve visibility.

New pages were developed for the Transparency section of the institutional website, focused on data presentation and export to different formats, instead of just offering file downloads in PDF format.

More than ten open datasets were published in Active and Passive Transparency.

Interventions that are considered successful, even though they only partially meet the purposes of interactivity, accessibility, and comprehension by citizens.

What solution does it propose?

The initiative aims to bridge the gap between data publication and its effective public use, offering a "Citizen Observatory" that facilitates understanding of parliamentary activity. It will promote access to a larger amount of open, up-to-date, and reusable data, enabling accountability for the work of legislators.

The platform will incorporate filters to explore different dimensions such as time period, political party, geographical location, age group and gender, allowing users to consult indicators related to attendance at plenary sessions or committees, submitted initiatives (bills, requests for information, requests for interpellations, among others) and topics of public interest.

What results do we want to achieve by implementing this commitment?

The Observatory represents a strategic tool to significantly improve access to and use of parliamentary data in several key aspects.

From an accessibility point of view, it facilitates the understanding of complex datasets through interactive visualizations, making them more accessible and understandable to a wide diversity of people.

In terms of analysis and understanding, it allows the identification of relevant patterns and relationships, such as the theme-based distribution of laws or the voting behaviors of legislators, thus contributing to a deeper and more structured reading of parliamentary activity.

Regarding contextualization, it links the data with real phenomena, enabling its analysis from multiple dimensions such as party affiliation, gender, territoriality or youth participation, among others.

This comprehensive approach strengthens institutional transparency by stimulating public interest, facilitating the monitoring of legislative activity, and promoting democratic oversight of parliamentary actions.

Commitment analysis

How will the commitment promote transparency?

The Parliament will enhance its transparency policy, incorporating sustainable processes for opening data and tools that facilitate its interpretation.

How will the commitment help foster accountability?

The system will facilitate citizen monitoring with greater active transparency, ensuring the availability, quality, and continuous updating of statistical information in the Transparency section of the institutional website, through standardized visualizations that use published open data.

How will the commitment improve citizen participation in defining, implementing, and monitoring solutions? 

Citizen participation will be enhanced by creating a platform that brings legislative work closer to the public, not only by providing accessible information but also opening opportunities for civil society to participate in the design, use, and continuous improvement of the tool. During the project's development phase, there will be consultations and/or participatory sessions with social organizations, journalists, academics, and other stakeholders to understand their legislative information needs. This input will guide the platform's key functionalities and content.