Open data for anopen parliament.
We believe that enhancing access to parliamentary data is essential for understanding, supporting, improving and communicating the work carried out by parliamentarians on behalf of all South Africans.
Enhancing transparency
By working with stakeholders to promote and improve the collection and sharing of reliable data.
Facilitating oversight
By creating tools that make parliamentary data easy to access, explore and understand.
Improving participation
Through the creation of resources that increase public understanding of parliamentary processes.
Empowering parliamentarians
By developing tools that make planning, reporting and understanding the work of parliament simpler.
Our mission
To advocate for and enhance the quality and availability of parliamentary data and create resources that inform citizens, facilitate oversight and empower parliamentarians.
ParliMeter’s aim is to improve transparency and accountability in South Africa’s parliament. Co-funded by the European Union under the Enhancing Accountability Programme, the platform offers real-time data for parliamentary activities such as attendance, and bill progress. In future, we aim to add more rich data including, but not limited to, voting patterns, public participation, oral and written questions, as well as meeting scheduling efficiency.
Through a collaboration between the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA), the Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG), and OpenUp, ParliMeter aims to simplify access to parliamentary data, empowering citizens and civil society to hold representatives accountable. By enhancing public engagement and monitoring, the platform seeks to invigorate Parliament’s oversight role and promote informed civic participation.
Work with us
We are looking for resource and data partners!
If you or your organisation would like to contribute or collaborate, please get in touch.
FAQs about ParliMeter
ParliMeter tracks parliamentary indicators such as Member of Parliament (MP) attendance, and legislative processes, providing tools like the Attendance Tracker and Bill Tracker to enhance transparency and public engagement.
ParliMeter aims to make parliamentary processes and MP performance more transparent, empowering citizens to hold their representatives accountable.
Sharing promotes accountability by enabling public scrutiny, even though data can sometimes be misinterpreted without proper context.
Citizens can follow parliamentary indicators and track developments over time to monitor the impact of measures and activities taken on the performance of parliament.
Our data process
Our pipeline for improving data quality, transparency and understanding.
1
Gather and understand user feedback
We engage with citizens, scholars, parliamentarians, CSO groups, government bodies and research institutions (and others) to discover gaps and opportunities relating to parliamentary data.
2
Source, clean and document relevant data
We work with our partners to establish whether the data to address these gaps and opportunities currently exists. If it does, we clean, verify and document it. If it does not, we do our best to source it or establish new data pipelines to collect it.
3
Build tools that explore this data
Once a reliable source for data has been established, we build interactive tools to make that data accessible to our users.
4
Create resources that add context and understanding
Often, data is not easy to interpret or understand for all audiences. When data requires context, supporting narrative or educational materials to fully grasp or make relevant, we work with our partners to create these resources.
5
Make recommendations and requests
Throughout this process, we take note of any gaps and opportunities for parliament to enhance transparency through implementing new, or updating existing, reporting processes, technology and data practices. We package these as recommendations and advocate for their adoption.
FAQs about our data
Parliament does not currently make it's data publicly accessible. One of the goals of this project is to advocate for open access to parliamentary data. We are willing and excited to work with Parliament to improve data access and transparency.
At the moment, ParliMeter accesses data through the PMG API. Our goal is to make the data you see on our platform simple to download without needing access to third party resources. As the project develops we will also be working with PMG to enhance the data that is available through their API.
The data is not officially sourced directly from Parliament, due to the limited input from Parliament itself. Instead, it is sourced from PMG based on their monitoring of Parliamentary proceedings. Absences might not always show valid reasons like illness or party duties.
Data is sourced from reliable platforms like PMG. The data is updated regularly, and every effort is made to ensure the data is accurate. The project is committed to correcting any errors brought to our attention. Users are encouraged to report discrepancies for correction.
ParliMeter acknowledges interpretation challenges but values transparency and data availability as critical to promoting accountability and informed discussion.
Our blog
Better data (recommendations) for a more transparent and effective parliament
What goes into Monitoring Parliament? Behind the scenes with PMG’s Monitors!
