Last year we came across implementing Legislative and Non-Legislative Assembly Business Management for Provincial Assembly of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa using open source tools like wordpress and it became a huge success. With 2.5 million hits a month and mostly unique visitors, this project gave access to profiles of MPAs, their legislative and non legislative business, party statistics and insight into parliamentary development.  We were quoted in main stream media and heavily discussed in social media for the awesome assembly portal that was well ahead of all other assembly portals.

We kept on thinking what to do next. What could be done best to bring reforms in parliament systems by the best use of information technology. We came across Bungeni, the best and probably only open source parliament management system.

Bungeni 2.0 is a Parliamentary and Legislative Information System that aims at making Parliaments more open and accessible to citizens … virtually allowing them ” inside Parliament” or “Bungeni” the Kiswahili word for “inside Parliament”.

Bungeni is a collaborative software development initiative based on open standards, AKOMA NTOSO  and open source applications that provides a leading solution for drafting, managing, consolidating and publishing legislative and other parliamentary documents.

Bungeni was an initiative of “Africa i-Parliament Action Plan”  a programme of UN/DESA.

Before we could begin with Bungeni, we had to go through the code that was hosted/ submitted to google code. A very well documented wiki of the Bungeni project was available already and we were unable to download the entire code within few minutes. (though it was not easy to download Deb package of bungeni plone, it was 480MB + but the download cancelled itself after every 90%, so we had to use resume supported IDM.)

After installing the following packages from code, we were in a mode to go ahead.

Operating System Download Link
Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit bungeni-workflow
Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit bungeni-postgresql
Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit bungeni-xml
Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit bungeni-plone-cms
Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit bungeni-proxy

The latest Ubuntu Desktop is currently offering Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS but this could support the code above, (however I am still using the older 12.04 64bit. so let me update it 🙂 )

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get upgrade

Here we are with a 4 GB RAM system with 250+ GB HDD free, though we needed just 1GB RAM and 15GB disk free for the test run.

The system prompted to enter password, after this the installation commenced by installing the dependencies and then completed.

The packages needed to be installed in the order listed above.

To install from the command line :

sudo gdebi bungeni_1.0+11113-2013-05-28_amd64.deb
sudo gdebi bungeni-postgresql_9.2+2013-05-28_amd64.deb
sudo gdebi bungeni-exist-db_2.0.0+18252-2013-05-28_amd64.deb
sudo gdebi bungeni-plone_4.3+11131-2013-05-29.deb
sudo gdebi bungeni-portal_0.6.1+11085-2013-05-28_amd64.deb

If you need to install gdebi you can install it using :

 sudo apt-get install gdebi-core

I was able to stop or start Bungeni using the command prompt

sudo service bungeni_services start 
sudo service bungeni_services stop