parliamentwatch.de
| parliamentwatch.de | |
|---|---|
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| www.abenkenwatch.de | |
| motto | Because transparency creates trust |
| Registration | Hamburg |
| languages | German |
| owner | Parliament Watch eV |
| Originator | Gregor Hackmack and Boris Hekele |
| Published | December 8, 2004 |
| Annual income | 618,660 EUR (2016) |
abgeordnetenwatch.de is a non-partisan and institutionally independent Internet platform, which opens the possibility of MPs to consult various parliaments in public. It was founded by Gregor Hackmack and Boris Hekele. Its sponsor is the registered association Parlamentwatch. In addition to questions and answers, professional qualifications, membership in committees , notifiable secondary activities and the voting behavior of the members of parliament for important parliamentary decisions are publicly available.
history
In the beginning, the portal in Hamburg was an online survey platform for election candidates and members of the Hamburg citizenship and Hamburg district assemblies. The first project started on December 8, 2004.
This was preceded by a successful referendum on the reform of the electoral law, which should give Hamburg citizens more opportunities to participate.
The online dialogue on parliamentwatch.de gave citizens the opportunity to get to know their politicians better in order to be able to make a competent decision at the next election. In the period that followed, the members of the Hamburg district assemblies could also be questioned on parliamentwatch.de.
With the meeting of the Hamburg citizenship , elected on February 24, 2008, parliamentwatch.de was temporarily suspended for the Hanseatic city until sufficient funding was collected. The reason given was that the project could no longer have been supervised on a voluntary basis.
According to the operators, since the launch of parliamentwatch.de for the Bundestag on December 8, 2006, to August 1, 2007, over 15,000 questions were asked, of which over 12,000 were answered, which corresponds to a rate of 80%. At that time, the page was clicked about 10,000 times a day.
The media partners of the project are the online editions of Der Spiegel , Süddeutsche Zeitung , Stern , Die Welt , Frankfurter Rundschau and Der Tagesspiegel . The project was voted into the final round of the Grimme Online Award in 2005 and 2007 .
In 2005, a platform was added with kandidatenwatch.de , which made it possible to interview candidates in European, federal and state elections. For the first time, questions could be asked of all direct candidates in the constituencies before the 2005 Bundestag election . The site also offered an overview of the election programs of almost all parties that ran for election with direct candidates .
Due to the success in the Bundestag , support groups were set up in August 2007 to make abstufenwatch.de available for the 16 state parliaments .
In 2009, parliamentwatch.de decided to run all future projects under the name parliamentwatch.de and none of them under kandidatenwatch.de.
After the Bundestag administration and the government parliamentary groups parliamentwatch.de refused to provide information about how many house ID cards were issued for lobbyists and for which clients these lobbyists work, the association sued the Berlin Administrative Court and was right because it was "an administrative activity of the Bundestag about specifically parliamentary action ”and the Freedom of Information Act requires an answer. The Bundestag administration appealed. However, Abenkenwatch.de has already put a partial list with 607 companies, associations and organizations on the Internet whose representatives have house ID cards from the Bundestag. Associations have the opportunity to register on Parliament's public list of lobbyists and apply for a house ID. The second way is to get a house ID with the support of the political groups; the signature of a parliamentary manager of the respective parliamentary group is sufficient.
function
Contact is currently possible with the members of the Bundestag , the German members of the European Parliament and the members of the state parliaments in Hamburg , Bavaria , North Rhine-Westphalia , Hesse , Berlin , Lower Saxony , Saxony , Schleswig-Holstein and Baden-Württemberg . Since June 2011, some district councils, city and local councils have also been represented. Equal contact with candidates for European , federal and state elections is possible via the branch kandidatenwatch.de . It is a non-profit project of the Parlamentwatch GmbH and is operated in cooperation with the associations Mehr Demokratie and Mehr Bürgerrechte as well as the social venture capital fund BonVenture . Both projects are to be financed in the medium and long term by setting up sponsorship groups, selling profile extensions (kandidatenwatch.de) and offering online advertising (which can, however, be hidden if desired). The Parlamentwatch GmbH has a voluntary commitment in its articles of association to donate all profits (should any ever arise) to non-profit organizations.
A basic entry is available for every candidate and is free of charge. It contains basic information about the person. For a one-time fee of 179 euros (state elections) up to 200 euros (federal elections), each candidate is given the opportunity to add a photo, a web link and dates for election campaign events as well as a self-formulated text on their own political work and goals on the website to publish. The profile extensions contribute to the financing of the portal.
All questions are checked against by a moderation team and compared with a moderation code, which u. a. offensive statements, hate speech, discrimination, questions about private life or inquiries that fall under the obligation of confidentiality is prohibited. If the code is violated, the questions will not be activated, but the politician will be informed of the process. In addition, the project is strictly committed to impartiality and neutrality. In addition to general information about the members of parliament, their voting behavior is also documented in votes that received particular media attention.
Sozialversicherung.watch: ver.di and parliament watch.de cooperate
The United Service Union (ver.di), in cooperation with parliamentwatch.de, wants to provide more transparency in the self-administration of social insurance and a greater interest in the social election in May 2017 with a new information offer. A dialogue platform is now available at the internet address socialversicherung.watch, on which ver.di candidates for the self-governing bodies of the social insurance institutions can answer questions from interested citizens. The operation and support of the information offer are in the hands of parliamentwatch.de. The social elections begin with the dispatch of the first election documents in April and are carried out purely as postal votes.
structure
Members of the board of trustees of parliamentwatch.de are:
parliamentwatch.de is a member of the Transparent Civil Society Initiative and the Parliamentwatch Network. A comparable Austrian internet opinion platform is MeinParlament.at.
Controversy
In the 2007 election in Bremen, the kandidatenwatch.de project was boycotted by the Bremen SPD and the Bremen Left Party , as NPD candidates were not excluded. Candidate Watch leader Hackmack pointed out that the project's moderation code prohibits, among other things, the mockery of victims of racism and tyranny. All admitted direct candidates are listed on parliamentwatch.de and can be questioned.
In September 2009 the Bundestag candidate of the Greens Hubertus Grass announced his participation in the project, as the NPD would be given an additional opportunity to spread racist and revanchist ideas. He stated that he "does not want to appear in any way with this party (NPD) and its representatives on a website or anywhere else" and referred to contributions by the NPD federal chairman Udo Voigt . The co-founder of the portal Gregor Hackmack assured that Voigt's contributions would be checked and pointed out that in the past NPD representatives had been excluded from the platform several times due to abuse.
In August 2009, the SPD member of the Bundestag, Sebastian Edathy, criticized the demand from ab altenwatch.de for 200 euros for an expansion of the profiles of members of parliament in the election campaign and warned against commercialization of the platform. In April 2010, Peter Hauk , CDU parliamentary group leader in Baden-Wuerttemberg, warned his party's MPs not to take part in parliamentwatch.de and to answer questions asked there. Hauk criticized the approach and the "supposed" transparency of the offer as "very questionable"; furthermore, information about his person is "largely incorrect". The website operator contradicted the criticism.
In August 2010, parliamentwatch.de criticized the SPD politician Peer Steinbrück for drawing high income from secondary employment, while on the other hand, according to research on the Internet platform, he only partially perceived his paid job as a member of the Bundestag. Steinbrück thereupon referred to the Beckmann television program as a “commercial platform” and a “commercial bunch”. He would not use this platform because money would be earned through advertising income and every citizen, however, could write to him for free. According to the platform, his claim does not correspond to the facts.
Members of the Bundestag from various parties are boycotting parliamentwatch.de, citing various reasons such as abuse by lobby groups, anonymity of the questioners and the role of the platform as a “self-appointed mediator” between citizens and politics.
Appreciations
In 2012 the Integrata Foundation awarded Boris Hekele von Parlamentwatch eV for the portal www.abektivenwatch.de with the Wolfgang Heilmann Prize on the topic of "More Democracy through Information Technology". The United Nations rated parliamentwatch.de 2013 as a good example of youth participation in politics throughout the election periods .
In Malaysia was modeled by abgeordnetenwatch.de one of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation supported similar website.
The National Democratic Institute in the USA honored Parliamentwatch for its innovation with a Democracy Award .
The online project fragdenbundestag.de was awarded the Otto Brenner Prize Media Project Prize in 2016 .
See also
Web links
- parliamentwatch.de
- Sozialversicherung.watch.de
- Candidate check for current elections , accessed November 3, 2015
- Blog from ab altenwatch.de , accessed on November 3, 2015
- Co-founder Gregor Hackmack in an interview on kitchen radio in summer 2009
supporting documents
- ↑ Annual and Impact Report 2016 , p. 22, Parlamentwatch eV, accessed on 23 August 2017
- ^ Society and Culture . In: External projects 2011 . Robert Bosch Foundation . Archived from the original on November 25, 2015.
- ↑ abuellenwatch.de for Hamburg is discontinued ( Memento of April 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), ab altenwatch.de, press release of March 4, 2008
- ↑ 24-hour citizens' consultation hour for all state parliaments ( memento from November 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), ab altenwatch.de, August 2, 2007
- ↑ With "Einstein's World", "Bildblog" and "Kebab Connection" into the final round ( Memento from July 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), Adolf Grimme Institute , press release from May 25, 2005 (PDF; 249 kB)
- ↑ abhabenwatch.de nominated for the Grimme Online-Award ( memento of November 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), abektivenwatch.de, May 10, 2007
- ↑ FAQ , parliament watch.de
- ↑ Representatives watch : Bundestag must disclose lobbyists . In: The time . June 18, 2015, ISSN 0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed November 13, 2016]).
- ↑ Partial list of lobbyists published in the Bundestag. In: tagesschau.de. Retrieved November 13, 2016 .
- ↑ Financing ( Memento from September 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), parliamentwatch.de
- ↑ Sozialversicherung.watch: ver.di and parliament watch.de cooperate on the social election 2017 - Bsirske: "Transparency strengthens self-administration" ver.di press release of January 16, 2017
- ↑ The board of trustees of parliamentwatch.de . In: parliamentwatch.de . May 21, 2013 ( ab altenwatch.de [accessed March 4, 2017]).
- ^ The Parliamentwatch Network
- ↑ In dialogue with politics , MeinParlament.at
- ^ SPD boycotts democracy , taz , March 27, 2007
- ↑ Termination at parliament watch.de because of NPD , heise online, September 12, 2009
- ↑ Edathy warns against commercialization , Kölner Stadtanzeiger, August 20, 2009, accessed on January 3, 2013
- ↑ CDU parliamentary group leader in Baden-Wuerttemberg thinks nothing of parliament watch, heise online, April 30, 2010, accessed on June 2, 2010
- ↑ Parliamentary Watch : Two books, 60 lectures and over one million euros: The additional income of Peer Steinbrück (with updates). Retrieved April 23, 2020 .
- ↑ Peer Steinbrück and the “commercial heap” ( memento from September 25, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), blog.abektivenwatch.de, September 21, 2010, accessed on October 2, 2010, wayback link examination on July 8, 2019
- ↑ Why politicians are boycotting parliament watch , WDR blog, August 24, 2012, accessed on January 3, 2013
- ↑ Prize 2012 - Main topic: More democracy through information technology , Wolfgang Heilmann Prize
- ^ Enhancing Youth Political Participation throughout the Electoral Cycle . United Nations Development Program , New York 2013, pp. 57 ( Online [PDF; 2.0 MB ]).
- ^ Politicians in Malaysia under the microscope . German wave . March 3, 2010.
- ^ The Civic Innovator: A Conversation with NDI's 2013 Democracy Award Recipients . NDI. Archived from the original on February 18, 2015.
- ↑ Otto Brenner Foundation honors outstanding journalism for the 12th time ( Memento from November 21, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Press release