Application Areas

More on the Vision, Mission and Strategy of Open Parliament TV

Digital Democracy

To integrate participatory democratic processes better into our digitised daily life, they need to be easily, promptly and directly accessible for everyone.

Videos of parliamentary debates serve as a tangible and contemporary interface to the daily work of parliaments. The recordings and livestreams are not just video collections for journalists or members of parliament but a direct application of the guiding principle “the parliament negotiates in public“.

With Open Parliament TV, we want to strengthen Digital Democracy by

  • making parliamentary processes more transparent and accessible
  • embedding political education in the context of current political debates in parliament
  • interlinking parliamentary debates with social discourse

We will

  • make video recordings of speeches searchable word by word beyond the boundaries of single parliaments
  • allow citing, embedding, sharing and commenting custom video segments within the context of the full speech
  • enrich speeches with background information on people, parties, factions, votes and the formation process of laws
  • automatically link relevant terms with additional information like explanatory videos, original documents or encyclopedic knowledge
  • develop tools and didactic concepts for the manual annotation / linking of speeches with teaching and learning resources
  • connect existing civic democracy projects and tools via open APIs with the Open Parliament TV platform
Target Groups
  • Politically interested citizens who critically engage with parliamentary developments
  • Citizens who are not yet engaged in parliamentary debates because of their bad accessibility
  • Parliamentary Monitoring Organisations (PMOs)
  • Transparency initiatives and organisations
  • Advocacy groups like environmental or watchdog organisations
  • Civic democracy initiatives, groups and associations
  • Individual actors or organisations in the field of political education
  • Politics teachers and lecturers
  • Open Data and Open Government activists
  • Parliamentary administrations

Media & Journalism

Parliamentary debates are a regular topic in news, on social media or in talk shows. In their function as “fourth estate“, journalists interpret developments in parliaments, critically analyse and discuss political standpoints and contextualise statements of politicians.

But the way videos of speeches in parliament are currently published is largely based upon sharing short key moments, with a clear lack of contextual information like a link to the full debate, relevant original documents or additional materials. This means video clips are used to share short moments, but as soon as the speeches are used for in-depth analyses, background articles, fact checks or longform reporting, the basis are the textual proceedings. Because the videos are neither searchable by keywords nor can specific statements be cited or directly interlinked.

We want to improve the usability of videos of parliamentary debates for journalistic purposes by

  • simplifying the finding, sharing, embedding and citation of specific video segments
  • allowing to embed up-to-date news coverage into speeches
  • providing tools for statistical evaluation and analysis of parliamentary debates

We will

  • improve and extend the citation features on the Open Parliament TV platform
  • develop tools which allow embedding and linking current news coverage in collaboration with media partners
  • develop custom interfaces for editorial systems and journalistic workflows
  • create a sustainable long-term technical infrastructure
  • publish evaluations and analysis of debates together with data journalists
  • create new formats and means of access for parliament tv in collaboration with news labs and innovation departments of public broadcasters
Target Groups
  • Data journalists, political editors, news editors
  • News labs and innovation departments of public broadcasters
  • Independent fact checking organisations and investigative journalists
  • Freelance journalists who review and comment parliamentary debates
    (in podcasts, Youtube channels, etc.)
  • Press agencies
  • Existing media partners of parliaments
  • Broadcasters who engage in parliamentary reporting
  • Archives of public broadcasters