The management of information/document is at the base of any parliamentary activities and  ICT  is undoubtedly the most powerful tool that we have currently have to manage parliamentary information/documents. Despite this in many parliaments ICTs and management of information and documents has not yet been given the required shared of resources and it has not yet become one of the core services of parliaments.

Parliaments need to adopt adequate governance models to handle what should be one of the most critical support services of a parliaments. Parliaments need to institutionalize information and knowledge management and make sure that enough resources are allocated to address the parliament’s strategic information management and technology priorities.

In this context possible areas on which to focus are:

• Establishment of dedicated ICT Steering Committees to drive and support modernization efforts in parliaments.
  Efforts of ICTs staff need both the guidance and support of the management of Parliaments in order to move on with any modernization within parliaments. The stetting up of ICT Steering Committees bringing together MPs, administrative management and IT managers has a proven record of being able to create the required momentum to lead to a successful deployment of ICT.

• Institutionalisation of the Chief Information Officer.
  Parliaments need to consider the institutionalisation of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) to ensure that the allocation of parliament’s knowledge management resources support the needs of the parliament and reflect the parliament’s strategic information management and technology priorities.

• ICT Service: establishing, managing, and supporting.
  Developing an ICT service structure that meets parliament's operational needs is essential. One of the most critical challenges confronting parliaments is to put in place an ICT service whose goals are clearly in line with the goals of the parliament at large.

• Institutionalisation: A professional and highly competent ICT staff who can provide critical services is essential to ensuring that a parliament can fulfill its legislative and representational mandates.  Staff must be well trained and be provided with opportunities for continuous learning.
• Establishing learning and professional development strategies. Through the use of skill-matrices and self-assessment tools, parliaments can assess their capacity level and evaluate the gaps in capacities and skills that may need to filled.

Parliaments need to build the managerial and technical skills of their staff to deal with challenges of the deployment of ICT in Parliaments.

In this context possible areas on which to focus are:

ICT managerial skills

• Vision: Vision and goals for ICT;
• Planning: Strategic planning; Programme / project formulation; Business case development: cost/benefit analysis;
• Management & Implementation: Leadership and high level management; Project management; Requirements management; Test management & quality assurance; Enterprise architecture (management); Financial management budgeting; Staffing and staff development;
• Standards & compliance: access to documents, privacy, security and liabilities policies; etc.

ICT technical skills

• Training Needs Assessment - Skills matrices and self assessment tools will enable parliaments to determine what skills and knowledge are needed for their members and staff and to assess the current level of those skills and knowledge. Based on the outcome of the assessment specific traming module that are most common to all could be developed to fill the training gaps.
• Bungeni WebTechLearning Resources:  learning modules on web technologies (CSS, Java, XHTML, RSS feeds, AJAX); information systems (Library Information System – Koha; Institutional Digital Repository – Dspace ; Content Management System – Plone/Zope; Bungeni Portal and Editor – functionalities, customizations, etc.
• AKOMA NTOSO XMLearning Resources: learning modules on XML families of technologies with specific reference to the management of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents, and more specifically focusing on learning, customization and deployment of XML technologies in general and with specific reference to AKOMA NTOSO standards.

AKOMA NTOSO XMLearning e-Modules

AKOMA NTOSO XMLearning Resources aim at providing knowledge of the XML families of technologies with specific reference to the management of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents, and more specifically focusing on learning, customization and deployment of XML technologies in general and with specific reference to AKOMA NTOSO standards.

XMLearning Resources will become the place to learn about XML and related technologies in  the parliamentary, legislative and judiciary context and about the technical characteristics of AKOMA NTOSO.

The XMLearning Resources will become not just a repository of e-learning and documentation but also a forum where learners and scholars can interact and exchange information and experiences toward building capacity in the field of legislative informatics in Africa.

The e-modules are meant to offer the opportunity to learn about XML technologies and their application as well as create accessible documentation and examples about AKOMA NTOSO schemata and their requirements.

The e-modules are focused on three main audience:

• managers: members of parliament, judges, clerks, legal practitioners, managers of public institutions or anyone wanting to gain a grasp of the fundamental concepts of the XML family of standards. It is meant for people  who need to be able to gain an appreciation of what the benefits are in using XML standards to codify documents, legislation, judgements, etc. in order to provide institutional/organiational leadership to lead to the adoption of XML in their organisation.
• drafters: subject matter experts in a specific matters e.g parliamentary proceedings, bills/acts, judgments, etc and are responsible for drafting, parliamentary proceedings or judgments and for “marking up” the final version of the a bill, a parliamentary debate etc. They are not required to know much about the technicality of XML but they should be very knowledgeable about the structures, semantics and explicit and implicit information carried by the different documents.
• toolmakers: IT developers who create and manage specialised tools by customizing editors' conversion tools that create valid AKOMA NTOSO documents and publish them in different formats. They need to have a thorough understanding of the XML families of technologies and be able to make use of AKOMA NTOSO technical documentation.

We have identified three tracks:

• Introductory Modules: appropriate for newcomers or people that want to brush up on their skills before moving onto more advanced courses on the other tracks.
• Foundation Modules: aimed at a more technical audience both the legal/parliamentary domain and IT one. It targets professionals who need to learn how to analyse and mark-up legal and parliamentary documents and IT experts who need to develop/customise solutions.
• Applications Modules: aimed at persons who need to apply the latest tools, techniques in the specific context of parliaments, courts, etc. Focuses on the use of AKOMA NTOSO and the technical skills required to mark-up the different documents, localise the schemas and customise the applications to create, manage, search and disseminate AKOMA NTOSO XML documents.

Introductory Modules

Most organisations are accustomed to creating and sharing information as part of their day-to-day activities. Information forms a valuable asset of any organisation.

If information assets can be enhanced to specify where, when and what the information is, then the organisation has created an even more valuable asset - knowledge! XML families of languages have become an ubiquitous technology for applications which store, manipulate and share structured information and allow organisations to transform information into valuable knowledge.

XML - Brief overview
(managers – drafters - toolmakers)

This short module provides a brief introduction to opportunities and challenges of XML in document management. It focuses on business problems and solutions that XML offers rather than technical issues.

Topics:

• Markup languages
• XML
• Semantic Web
• The role of XML in your organisation
• open access
• added value services
• interoperability (vendor neutral)
• What does it imply for an organisation to adopt XML
• What next?

XML: an overview
(toolmakers - drafters - managers)

The Introduction to XML is designed to introduce the many and varied aspects of XML design, processing and delivery XML documents.

Topics:

• The XML standards
• The w3c consortium (An example HTML, this will be useful in the next point (XSLT transformation))
• How to model information through XML
• Validation using XML schema
• XML versus relational DATABASE
• How to search with XPath and Xquery
• XML presentation
• Transformation with XSLT
• Paginated output with XSL-FO

Foundation Modules

Information as a Institutional  and Democratic Asset
(managers – drafters - toolmakers)

Information can be transformed into knowledge by adding metadata (information about the information), ontology (classification schemes that organise the concepts in a vocabulary of terms that are used to populate the values of metadata), processes (a representation of the business processes and procedures that are performed in an organisation) and meaning (identify the relevant semantic part of any document).

XML is an ideal technology for representing information (content) and for providing the necessary tools to turn content into knowledge.

Topics:

• The value that can be unlocked by representing content and knowledge as XML
• How to present the business case for XML
• The organisation and governance required to maximise return on investment
• The levels of planning and control needed to run the knowledge-management process
• Using appropriate tools and technologies make the content supply chain most efficient
• How to turn information assets into more valuable knowledge bases
• New XML standards for creating and delivering executable knowledge

Legal, Juridical and Analytical Basis
(drafters - toolmakers)

The purpose of this module is to introduce a few parliamentary and juridical topics.

Topics:

• Juridical systems in the world and the professions of the law, computer science for juridical professions.
• The public administration: the process of legislation, parliamentary procedures, civil and criminal procedure, and other types of legal activities in the public administration.
• Identification of logical and strcutural part of parliamentary, legislative and judicial texts.
• Describing documents, metadata and metadata models of parliamentary, legislative and judicial texts.
• Semantic components of parliamentary, legislative and judicial texts.
• Ontology and XML vocabularies.

Introduction to XML
(toolmakers - drafters ) 

This module will introduce the user to some  technical concepts and technologies used for working with XML documents. It illustrates how to create data structures, create an XML schema model and parse/validate the document structure.

Topics:

• Markup Languages and basis of HTML.
• XML Syntax.
• XML schema basis.
• Namespaces in XML and their importance.
• Parsing XML – DOM based parsers, SAX based parsers.
• Advanced Validation – checking xml documents against their schema.
• Common data models represented as XML.
• Xpath – addressing parts of a XML document.
• Xquery – XML Querying Language.
• The capabilities of native XML and relational databases.
• Transforming XML into other forms using XSLT.
• Formatting XML for output - XSL-FO.
• Common applications of XML - Service Oriented Architectures (web services), RSS feeds, Open document formats.
• Some useful XML management tools.

XSL: XML Style Language
(toolmakers)

XSL is a very powerful and practical family of languages that provides the power, to novices as well as to experienced programmers, to make extraction of XML data from large collections of XML and other formats easy and to convert your XML into slickly laid-out pages for publishing in PDF and other presentation-oriented formats.

Topics:

• XSL:
• XSLT - a language for transforming XML documents.
• XPath - a language for navigating in XML documents.
• XSL-FO - a language for formatting XML documents.

Applications Modules

These modules will show how the use of XML and related technologies should be effectively deployed to store, manipulate and share information specifically in the context of the management of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents.

Building XML Applications
(managers - drafters - toolmakers)

This module assesses the types of applications that are best implemented using XML to support the creation, management and dissemination of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents. It provides a clear presentation of the steps to building XML applications, from the initial analysis and design of data and information models, how information can be represented in XML (including how the best XML schema languages can be chosen), and how the XML model can be stored persistently, accessed dynamically by applications and presented to users on any type of interactive device to deal with laws, parliamentary documents, judgments etc.

Topics:

• The role of XML standards in information modelling.
• The architecture of an institutional XML application.
• How XML can be applied to the management and exchange of information in public administrations.
• Which types of procedures should be implemented using XML.
• How access and services requirements drive data models.
• Where XML-based systems are being adopted in public administrations around the world .

AKOMA NTOSO: introduction
(managers - drafters - toolmakers)

The purpose of this section is to introduce the history, aims, and basic concepts connected to the AKOMA NTOSO project and its sibling projects.

Topics:

• What is AKOMA NTOSO?
• Introduction to the standard, the schema and the documentation
• Examples of AKOMA NTOSO documents
• AKOMA NTOSO Applications

AKOMA NTOSO: the language and the naming convention
(drafters - toolmakers) 

The purpose of this module is to introduce the details of the AKOMA NTOSO standard and naming convention. The presentation covers theoretical as well as practical aspects behind the AKOMA NTOSO series of standards.

Topics:

• The AKOMA NTOSO XML standard: basic document types, patterns found in documents, structural, typographical and semantic elements. A half-day course with theory.
• AKOMA NTOSO XML schema.
• How to describe an AKOMA NTOSO document.
• How to describe document metadata - AKOMA NTOSO Metadata.
• Document Annexes and Attachments.
• Naming convention, the FRBR and Dublin Core standards. A half-day course with theory and exercises.
• Determining the URI of documents. A half-day course with theory and exercises.
• Categorizing the document

AKOMA NTOSO: the mark-up of documents
(drafters - toolmakers)

 The purpose of this module is to introduce the legal and analytical skills required by clerks ( e.g. parliamentary and judiciaries clerks) to mark-up parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents with AKOMA NTOSO.

Topics:

• Temporal markup and consolidation.
• Legal ontologies, rules, content analysis
• Extensions of the schema, generic elements, local rules and additions

AKOMA NTOSO: Creating Customisations and Tools
( toolmakers)

The purpose of this module is to introduce IT staff working in parliaments or judiciary to relevant skills required to the customization, extension and creation of software tools specifically tuned for the management of AKOMA NTOSO documents and all needs that may arise in local environments.

Topics:

• Storing and searching documents: XML databases, query languages.
• Presentation of AN documents: conversion, styles, and typography. XHTML, CSS, XSLT, XSL-FO
• Validation of AN documents: rules, exceptions, prescription and description, co-constraints. DTD, XML Schema, Schematron. 

By exercising their legislative, representative, and oversight functions and responsibilities, parliaments can address the challenges associated with creating an equitable information society and play a leadership role in this field.

In this context possible areas on which to focus are:

• Legislative frameworks and institutional architectures: Role of Parliament in advancing the Information Society.
  In a sector as dynamic as ICT, implementation strategies and policy outcomes need to be constantly monitored and evaluated and decision-makers nimble and responsive to change while ensuring long term stability and certainty. Governance is a determining factor of successful communications sector reform.

• Internet rights and governance: Guaranteeing fundamental rights.
  Parliaments have to deal with new challenges of promoting, regulating and safeguarding the development of an equitable Information Society. The main issues here are: expanding opportunities for citizens to access public information and actively participate in policy formulation; ensuring citizen rights of expression in the evolving Internet world; data protection and cyber-crimes. The deployment of the new technologies should be monitored and appraised not only in terms of economic development but also of the need to protect the citizen’s rights and the more deprived and disadvantaged sectors of society.

• Information Society and Knowledge Economy: accessibility and collective interest.
  Access to knowledge is an issue in the Information Society that is characterised by the constant creation of knowledge, whose scarcity is not primarily the effect of naturally-occurring events but of deliberate commercial policies. This artificially-created scarcity of information/knowledge could deprive millions of people of extraordinary possibilities for their individual and communal growth especially in Africa where access to knowledge is also key for its development.

• Open Source Software and Open Standards.
  The Internet owes its explosive growth and impact to its foundation on open standards and open software. Studies indicate that moving from proprietary software to open standards and open source software in public administration may have a considerable economic impact. African parliaments now have the opportunity to participate in, and benefit from, the open software movement. Legislative support for open software and open standards also has the potential to influence the development of the information technology industry in Africa positively. Enabling greater user control of software and systems development in Africa could mean both more opportunities to localise applications to the specific situation and languages and also to build synergies for a more indigenous and sustainable software industry.