When I asked Veronika Sumova from KohoVolit.eu about the nature of their Parliament monitoring activities she pointed out that the 2011 will be their year of shifting from event based analysis to on-going monitoring – the change which we are currently supporting. The MP’s analysis available on their site is something they are used to do at the end of each year based on their methodology. That and the ways of promoting the actual site will be used in 2011 in implementation of on-going monitoring. So before we say goodbye to 2010 let’s have the last look at the MP’s analysis – mainly for the sake of all transparency projects working with short term analysis and of course for our own reference.

Michal Skop has updated us on the scope and methodology of the current MP’s analysis:

“We have covered only the Czech and Slovak parliaments for now, for this end of the year.
Index KohoVolit.eu for this year is:
weights:
1/2 – presence (at divisions)
1/6 – speeches
1/6 – interpellations
1/6 – proposals
(again, computed as “number of MPs worse than the one” – this is because it allows “sum” different values together, like presence and number of speeches)
We could use it only for the Czech Rep., the Slovak parliamentary website is not working at the moment so well, we were able to extract only the presence and numbers of proposals.

We treat these analyses as the last “pilot” version before the automated ones (which should include also the Czech Senate, the major cities and EP; but apart of EP, all the others had elections just a month or two ago, it does not make sense to prepare such analyses now).”

Veronika is in the meantime dealing with promotion:

“I am now actively working on promoting the Czech data… especially as I have written before specialized and modified ‘packages’ for regional media…

Response of public: I would say quite high above average, considering czech NGOs, watchdogs especially… Before the parliament elections at both Czech Rep and Slovakia more than 250 000 people tried our VAAs. Of course, until now our activities were always short-term as VAAs before elections or the MPs analysis… with WTT (comprising ideally also some of the features of TheyWorkForYou.com), this is going to change, so also the style of PR will have to change…”

Michal also added a link to the coverage of their analysis on one of the major Czech new portals here. He also pointed out:

“We also prepared charts of voting behaviours in the parliaments (during this years):
http://cs.kohovolit.eu/cz/psp/analysis/analyza-hlasovani-2010
and
http://sk.kohovolit.eu/sk/nrsr/analysis/analyza-hlasovani-2010
I am still looking for the best way how to communicate these to the public…”

If you have any ideas on how to promote those sites, do let Veronika and Michal know!

As we enter 2011 we are looking forward to the new ideas and processes of on-going monitoring in both countries.

Happy New Year!