Gong's Parlametar.hr has a new option, "Ask a Question," that allows citizens to ask a question of a member of parliament directly and publicly, to which the latter then publicly responds.
Gong has improved its Parlametar, so we have added "Ask a question" ("Postavite pitanje") to the options that open when you open the profile of a MP. The procedure is simple and easy. In the field under the inscription: "Write your question to MP" ("Napišite vaše pitanje za zastupnika/zastupnicu"), write your question, press the button "Send" ("Pošalji") and the question will be sent to the e-mail address of the selected MP.
In the first step, your question will pass through Gong's profanity filter, whereby - we emphasize - we will forward possible threats to the competent authorities of the Republic of Croatia for criminal prosecution.
In the next step, the questions are sent to the parliamentary e-mail addresses of the MPs who have provided us with their personal official address, or to the address of the MPs' Club or the Information and Documentation Department of the Croatian Parliament, which in turn forwards the e-mails with the questions to the selected MP.
In the third step, the MPs answer the question, and the answer appears on Parlametar under "Questions and Answers" ("Postavljena pitanja i odgovori") of the selected MP and is publicly available for everyone to see. We remind the users of Parlametar that by selecting one of the icons in the lower right corner of one of the frames, you can share the content of that frame on social networks, in articles - wherever it is convenient for you - either as a code or as a short link.
In the 2020 elections, approximately 1.7 million citizens elected 151 deputies to represent them in the supreme legislative body of the Republic of Croatia. Today, these 151 elected representatives have a direct impact on the lives of almost four million inhabitants of the Republic of Croatia through the laws and decisions they make.
The importance of communication between citizens and the representatives they elect to parliament has long been recognized in several Western parliamentary democracies, such as the United Kingdom and Germany. For example, citizens have the opportunity to communicate with members of parliament through their personal profiles on the pages of the German Bundestag or the British House of Commons.
It is not available in this form on the pages of the Croatian Parliament. One reason for this could be the limited resources of the parliament, as Oliver Kannenberg, research associate at the Institute for Parliamentary Research (IParl) in Berlin, recently analyzed for Gong.
The same options are offered throughout the Parlametar, on the list of sessions, parliamentary committees, votes, participation in votes in the parliament of individual deputies as well as whole clubs and so on, up to the transcripts of speeches in the parliament.
All data used by Parlametar for the analysis of votes and transcripts and, more recently, for communication between citizens and 151 MPs, are automatically downloaded by this tool from the pages of the Croatian Parliament and its Information and Documentation Department, where they are published in an open format.
Parlametar organizes the large and complex structure of the Parliament in an intuitive and transparent way, similar to social networks, allowing users to easily study the content and effortlessly share finished visualizations. Parlametar thus proves to be an important argument for opening the data of public institutions in a machine-readable format.
On the homepage of Parlametar you can register for free and subscribe to the newsletter, in which we publish a weekly overview of the work of the Parliament and a column by Parliament correspondent Sandra Bartolović, as well as articles by guest experts.
With the new possibility to publicly ask questions to MPs and have them publicly answered, you are one step closer to participatory democracy and do not accept the status of a passive electorate, which is only periodically invited to participate in the political process of the Republic of Croatia with a stroke of the pen.
