Current State after the Launch

Happy New Year everyone!

It has been 2 months since we officially launched Open Parliament TV. Since then, parliamentary administrations, journalists, teachers, MPs, parliamentary fractions, activists, research groups, NGOs, companies and ministries have been contacting us, wanting to use our platform or our data for various purposes. Some of these are long-term research projects, while others are immediate and preferably on a daily basis.

We were able to develop Open Parliament TV within the framework of a grant from MIZ Babelsberg (a total of almost 37,500€ over a period of 16 months). This was only possible because a lot of preparatory work and also during the project period a lot of voluntary commitment went into the project.

We are trying very hard to do justice to the overwhelming interest in Open Parliament TV and to adjust to the new situation in terms of personnel, but we have to make two things clear:

1. We are currently working without funding

We are answering enquiries, correcting errors in the platform, working on improving the data basis and, apart from all that, we are taking care of setting up cooperations on various levels and communicating the vision of a cross-parliamentary linking of debates on a political level.

The fact is, however, that just one person is taking care of the project on a full-time voluntary basis and is investing private funds in order to pay the other team members fairly for their work. That’s perfectly OK for the time being. The first cooperations are already taking place and we are very confident that we will soon be able to finance this project in a solid and sustainable way. But it clashes a bit with the expectations that we sometimes perceive when we receive enquiries.

Which brings us to the second point:

2. We need support

To make Open Parliament TV what we want it to be, we need support. Individual project funding, commissions by parliamentary administrations or cooperation with media partners can be helpful to cross-finance further developments.

But what we really need is solid basic funding from foundations and public bodies.

We do not intend to become a pure IT service provider for parliaments (even if there is certainly good money to be made). With Open Parliament TV, we are fulfilling a non-profit task that goes far beyond the scope of responsibility of a single parliament and encompasses much more than the development of software solutions (more on this in this guest article for Wikimedia Germany).

Until we get the support we need to sustainably fund the project, we have to work with the resources we have.

This also means that we are forced to “prioritise away” things that would actually be important. This includes updating the data as well as improving the processes for integrating new speeches in the German Bundestag on a daily basis.

We must now concentrate on setting up Open Parliament TV better in terms of strategy, personnel and organisation. Everything else will have to wait.

We especially ask foundations and public bodies that want to support us in making political debates more transparent and linking them across parliamentary borders to contact us.