The meeting was attended by 83 delegates including Secretaries General from parliaments already using XML for their documents, as well as legislative and legal informatics experts from a selected number of international organizations, universities, foundations and civil society organizations. Here you can find more information about the Conference.

Akoma Ntoso was featured in several presentations and the process of standardisation of Akoma Ntoso at OASIS was presented and discussed by Mr. James Cabral, Chair of the LegalXML Steering Committee . Moreover, BungenEditor and Bungeni portal were presented to show how they can support the production of XML documents and more specifically of Akoma Ntoso compliant parliamentary and legislative documents. The presentations were well received and followed by interesting discussions. The Bungeni suite of applications was commended for providing very valuable tools to manage parliamentary documents and provide open and reusable information for citizens to participate and hold parliament accountable, thus enhancing parliaments' transparency and efficiency.

The conference placed the issue of open standards and open systems at the core of parliaments, and there has been a general appreciation that they are set to be the emerging issues for inter parliamentary cooperation in the years to come.

Increasingly, there will be a need for tools to effectively utilise Akoma Ntoso and more in general support parliaments in their path towards the adoption of open semantic technologies. To this end, a higher level of cooperation is to be achieved among parliaments so that knowledge, expertise, tools and practices on open document standards can be effectively shared and placed at the disposal of the whole parliamentary community. We hope that the good will and shared appreciation expressed by all parliaments representatives attending the conference will further strengthen the collaboration and share of know-how for the benefit of ALL parliaments.

For further information on the meeting please click on the links below:

• http://www.ictparliament.org/XMLMeeting2012
• https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%23legxmled