On Wednesday, 15th of June, Work Package 5 of the OPTED consortium organised a conference on “Parliamentary Data for a Better Democracy”. Held in the symbolic surroundings of the European Parliament in Brussels, they invited speakers and attendees from the domains of parliamentary data archives, academic research and data journalism to exchange ideas on the potentials of parliamentary data.

The team of Work Package 5 detailed the progress of their work on an inventory of European parliamentary corpora and discussed the possibilities of parliamentary data. Later roundtables focused on whether better access to data can foster democracy through transparency and accountability. Other discussions also highlighted different projects from across the EU that use parliamentary and political data, but also featured those working in parliamentary institutions to share their perspective on data availability (the full programme can be found at: https://data4parliaments.org/). The exchanges allowed the different stakeholders to exchange wishes, share their different needs, but also constraints, and learn from each other's perspectives.

The results of the conference will be summarised in a white-paper, published soon on the OPTED website.