Open Parliament in the Clouds – Benny Daon

Benny Daon (Open Knesset, Israel) presented the project that is being developed for four years in Israel. He stressed the importance of government, which is there in first place to give security to the people. But the people should not give unchecked power to the state so easily. If the government becomes too powerful, the system becomes unbalanced. The future, he says, is in the use of internet, which can be one of the tools that can help citizens to monitor the state.

The parliament is a physical place where certain number of representatives debate, but with the open parliament system, we could track politicians. It would work on the principle that representatives would receive points, and then voters could follow how many points which representative received and decide on next elections who deserved their vote and who didn’t.

Open Knesset project has made some progress so far – it is present in the parliament; it has created biographies, activity streams and maps of members of the parliament, it made activity streams, public voting and comments on bills and marks them as bad or good, it annotated and bookmarked protocols. Through these actions, it empowered citizens with information about their representatives. In future, Open Knesset wants to focus on representatives: the idea is to inform them what the public views are on issues being discussed in the parliament. With this, the representatives would know what the public wants and help them to decide how they will vote in the parliament.