ABSTRACT
Parliaments are institutions of vital importance for modern democracies with highly important responsibilities: making laws, communicating with and representing citizens and overseeing the executive. The rapid growth and penetration of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has changed considerably the environment in which parliaments operate: citizens (and especially the youth), firms and government agencies are increasingly using ICT both for doing their internal work more efficiently and for communicating with others. Responding to this trend, in combination with the highly informationintensive nature of their responsibilities and tasks, parliaments have started using ICTs for supporting both their internal operations (e.g. for managing their numerous legislative documents, for financial accounting, etc.) and their communication with citizens and groups interested in the legislation under formation and discussion. According to the World e-Parliament Report 2010 1 of the 'Global Centre for ICT in Parliament' (a partnership initiative of the United Nations 2 and the Inter-Parliamentary Union) 3 there is a growing use of ICTs by parliaments all over the world driven by their fundamental values and objectives: representativeness, transparency, accessibility, accountability and effectiveness 4 In particular, the study presented in the above report, which has been based on a survey of 134 parliaments from all over the world, concludes that there is wide use of 'basic' ICT tools by them. For instance, almost all the surveyed parliaments have a website (for promoting transparency and accountability), 96 per cent have a local area network (LAN) (for increasing effectiveness), 80 per cent provide Members of Parliament (MPs) with either desktop or laptop computers (also for increasing effectiveness), while 78 per cent reported that most or some MPs use e-mail in order to communicate with citizens (for promoting accessibility, interaction with society and representativeness). However, the same study also concludes that there is much lower use of more advanced ICT with high potential to be very useful to parliaments for achieving their objectives and promoting their values. For instance, less than half of the surveyed parliaments have systems supporting the management of proposed legislation documents all over their life cycle (which would considerably increase internal effectiveness and transparency), only 25 per cent use the XML standard for parliamentary documents (which would improve processing and dissemination capabilities, promoting effectiveness, accessibility and transparency), while much less, only 16 per cent, organize e-consultations on bills (which would considerably enhance accessibility, interaction with society and representativeness).
