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<p>The recommendations from the Speaker of the House of Commons’ Commission on Digital
Democracy are presently being actively considered by the relevant bodies in each House,
including comparing existing plans and projects to the recommendations made. As most
of the recommendations in the Report concern the House of Commons this answer only
covers ongoing work which involves the House of Lords.</p><p> </p><p>The Digital Democracy
Report recommended that all published information and broadcast footage produced by
Parliament should be freely available online in formats suitable for re-use. In July
2014 the House of Lords Management Board, in parallel with its House of Commons equivalent,
committed to making this happen. Significant work has already been completed to develop
the data.parliament.uk platform which publishes parliamentary data in easily re-usable
formats. The aim is that all parliamentary data that is in the public domain will
be available on data.parliament.uk but for some types of information this will take
significant work. Current House of Lords Hansard is already published on data.parliament.uk
in XML format; Hansard archive data going back to the year 1803 is also available
as XML files. The Register of Lords’ Interests is another dataset published on data.parliament.uk
platform; this is available as an API which returns data in various formats including
JSON and XML. A full list of datasets currently available can be found from the Parliamentary
website: <a href="http://www.data.parliament.uk/dataset" target="_blank">www.data.parliament.uk/dataset</a>.
Further sets of data will be added in the coming months</p><p> </p><p>Parliament encourages
the reuse of material made available. Use of Parliamentary material is governed by
the terms of the Open Parliament Licence (further details can be found on the Parliamentary
website: <a href="http://www.parliament.uk/site-information/copyright/open-parliament-licence"
target="_blank">www.parliament.uk/site-information/copyright/open-parliament-licence</a>).
The Open Parliament Licence is designed to allow Parliamentary material to be used
freely and flexibly, consistent with the way public sector information is made available
for use under the Open Government Licence.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The new Director
of the Parliamentary Digital Service will join Parliament in March 2015 and take responsibility
the new Service from April 2015. He will be tasked with developing and implementing
a digital strategy for Parliament that will put digital first, making the best use
of digital technology to strengthen the United Kingdom’s key democratic institution
while enabling citizens to access Parliament in new and meaningful ways. The new digital
strategy will outline the resources and skills needed to deliver it, as well as policies
about data and plans for future ICT projects.</p>
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