This working paper, commissioned by the Global Centre in preparation for the World e-Parliament Report 2008, aims at providing an overview of the state of the art and of the prospects of the application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the legislative domain, in particular concerning the management of legislative documents. The paper introduces the concepts of legal informatics and legislative informatics, describes the evolution of the ICT-based management of legislative documents and identifies and evaluates emergent approaches, focusing on those based on open standards.

This working paper is aimed at providing guidance to ICT administrations in parliaments on the available approaches for developing and consolidating requirements for ICT systems. It intends to offer useful guidelines on how to raise stakeholder involvement and secure their support during the critical start-up phase of ICT system implementations. The audience that this paper aims at includes decision makers and ICT administrators in parliaments, as well as ICT project managers and system analysts who are technically responsible for implementing systems that meet user needs.