South Africa's Parliament has an open source Parliamentary Monitoring Group website Yes that means the website's source code can be used by anyone else for free. What is also nice is that there is an API for 3rd party sites or mobile apps to use this data. The system itself did not cost any money for government (the taxpayer) to develop as it is funded through donors such as the Black Sash, Open Democracy Advice Centre, Media Monitoring Africa, and many others. This is the type of system that we really need governments to provide: Open source for re-use by others, public APIs to use the data, and information that helps provide transparency and accountability from governments to their people. What is the Parliamentary Monitoring Group? The Parliamentary Monitoring Group, an information service, was established in 1995 as a partnership between Black Sash, Human Rights Committee and Idasa with the aim of providing a type of Hansard for the proceedings of the more than fifty South African Parliamentary Committees for these three advocacy organisations. This was because there is no official record publicly available of the committee proceedings - the engine room of Parliament - and this type of information is needed by social justice organisations to lobby the Parliament of South Africa on pieces of legislation, matters of democratic processes and parliamentary oversight of the executive. This website was set up at the beginning of 1998 to make the information generated available to a wider audience. Presently this is the only source for this type of information. We hope that the PMG committee reports and other documents will provide the public with an insight into the Parliament of South Africa and its daily activity. Importantly it provides a window into the performance of each government department and public entity over which each parliamentary committee has oversight. PMG became a fully fledged independent NGO in July 2009. See the site at https://pmg.org.za/
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