By Innocent Rugambwa

The Report, prepared by the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament, intends to help legislatures to harness the potential benefits of ICT for their work and establish key goals and priorities for exploiting this valuable resource.

Dear colleagues,

We are very pleased to inform you that the United Nations and theInter-Parliamentary Union just released the World e-Parliament Report 2012.

The Report, prepared by the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament, intends to help legislatures to harness the potential benefits of ICT for their work and establish key goals and priorities for exploiting this valuable resource. While providing evidence of the complexities of e-parliament, the Report suggests ways to overcome some of the obstacles to the effective use of technology in parliamentary settings.

The findings presented in the World e-Parliament Report 2012are based on the results of the Global Survey of ICT in Parliaments conducted by the Global Centre between February and May 2012, to which 156 parliamentary assemblies responded.

The World e-Parliament Report 2012 is the third in a series that began in 2008. The first edition established a baseline of how parliaments were using ICT to help them fulfil their responsibilities and to connect to their constituencies. The second edition, in 2010, built on that work to evaluate the progress accomplished by parliaments during the intervening two years in their efforts to use modern technologies to strengthen their institutional role. The present 2012 edition documents the efforts of legislatures to use information and communication technologies (ICT) suggesting that, while many of the challenges to the effective use of ICT noted in the previous Reports are still present, there has been limited but nevertheless important progress in the state of e-parliament in the past two years.

The Report covers the following topics: Developments in ICT and parliaments since 2010; Communication and engagement with citizens; Achieving openness, transparency, and accountability through websites; Technology services for members; Management of parliamentary documentation; Libraries and research services; Human resources and technical infrastructure; ICT strategic planning and implementation for e-parliament; The state of e-parliament in 2012;

Advances in international cooperation. In addition, the Reportfurther provides a methodology that can serve as a tool for parliaments to improve their performance in key areas of e-Parliament.

The cruciality of managing information effectively to support the work of the parliament, the opportunities and challenges that ICT tools offer to achieve this result, and the role that parliamentary library and research services can play in leveraging tecnologies to the benefit of the institution they serve, are widely adressed in chapter 6 of the Report. In addition to this dedicated chapter, the role of parliamentary Libraries and the state of their current adotpion of technology is assessed and discussed throughout other parts of the Report.

The importance of Interparliamentary cooperation is strongly addressed in the Report, which also highlights the activity of the IFLA parliamentary Section in this domain, as well as the work it undertakes to make its members aware of the opportunities offered by applying technologies in the library context, and the need for a stronger committment in this area.

The World e-Parliament Report 2012is available for download inEnglish on the Global Centre website. It will soon be available inFrench.

We trust you will benefit from this publication and encourage you to share this information with colleagues in your Parliament.