The African Parliaments and the Africa i-Parliament Action Plan are proud to have been behind an initiative that is already used by Parliaments outside Africa and hopefully soon a standard for parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents for Parliaments all over the world.

Africa i-Parliament Action Plan has already joined OASIS to keep supporting and driving the standardisation process. OASIS is a consortium with more than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries. OASIS is distinguished by its transparent governance and operating procedures.

The objectives of the LeDML Technical Committee (TC) are:

• to promote a common legal document standard (based on Akoma Ntoso) for creating a world-wide best practice that helps in the dissemination of the usage of XML within the parliaments’ document management processes as well as the courts document management;
• to collect the requirements from the community of the stakeholders managing legislative and legal documents (editors, libraries, public institutions, tribunals, publishers, etc.) in order to extend and refine the standard;
• to set up a community that supports the stakeholders in order to adopt LeDML locally;
• to provide technical specifications and documentation in order to support the developers of tools and software applications relying on LeDML.

Having Akoma Ntoso as OASIS standard will mean to have its management carried out inside of a well-controlled work-flow, endorsed by a strong management procedure, within an accredited standard organization like OASIS. Becoming an internationally recognised standard makes Akoma Ntoso more sustainable and encourages its adoption since:

• it will provide a global audience for advancement of the standard within the broader community;
• it will allow for better definition of business cases and user requirements;
• it will protect the standard from single-vendor bias;
• it will unify other fragmented efforts (e.g. the EP using and modifying Akoma Ntoso in isolation) and encourage convergence;
• it will promote adoption and educate user communities;
• it will grow the market for standards-compliant products and services, which in turn will give a higher profile also to our other projects such as Bungeni Portal, Bungeni Editor etc., which are Akoma Ntoso compliant.

Africa i-Parliament Action Plan has been exploring venues to find sponsorships to support the membership costs of African stakeholders that will be invited to join OASIS Technical Committee on Legal Documents, to make sure that needs and contributions of African institutions will have a saying also in this very important phase.

We will keep you posted on the progresses. Again, thanks to the African Parliaments for their support without which this great goal would have not been achieved.