On 19 March 2013, Rainer Wieland, Vice President of the European Parliament, announced, in a video conference with the United Nations Department for General Assembly and Conference Management from New York, the UN/DESA’s Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan from Nairobi and the Senate of Italy from Rome, the availability of Open AT4AM for any parliament and institution interested in taking advantage of this effective IT tool that has made the life of MEPs easier.

AT4AM, a web editor provided to Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), has largely improved the drafting of amendments at the European Parliament since its introduction in 2010. In May 2012, at the opening of the international workshop "Identifying benefits deriving from the adoption of XML-based chains for drafting legislation", Vice President Wieland, announced the launch of a new project aimed at providing the open source version of the tool. Further to it, AT4AM featured among the presentations at the World e-Parliament Conference 2012 in Rome and was mentioned in the World e-Parliament Report 2012.

Open AT4AM, the open source version of AT4AM, was developed by the Information Technology Department of the European Parliament with the contribution of the ICT Department of the Senate of Italy.

Open AT4AM is provided with all the important features of the tool used at the European Parliament and can manage all type of legislative content provided in the XML format Akoma Ntoso. This XML standard, developed through the UN/DESA’s initiative Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan, will be soon certified by OASIS. It is expected that Akoma Ntoso will be adopted by an increasing number of parliaments and legislative bodies in the future.

The code of Open AT4AM is released under the European open source licence EUPL.

For more information and to access the code and the sample of Open AT4AM you can visit the web site: www.at4am.org

• Click here for the press release of the European Parliament
• Click here for the press release of the Senate of Italy