Building the Future of Parliaments, Together: Digital Parliaments Project 2026 Q1 Convening Progress Report
Many parliaments across the world have more in common than they might realize: the same digitization backlogs, the same institutional memory challenges, the same desire to adopt modern technology without a realistic roadmap to get there. The Digital Parliaments Project (DPP) is an initiative to partner directly with parliaments to create a community of both shared learning and technological advancement to strengthen the internal operations of legislatures, and build that road map together.
The DPP Quarterly Convenings are formal virtual gatherings to share what’s been accomplished, what’s in the pipeline, and what ongoing challenges and solutions we can tackle in the months ahead. The participation by all those involved has been and continues to be essential for the project. DPP was built on the premise that parliamentary modernization shouldn't require every legislature to reinvent the wheel alone, and that the fastest path forward is to work together.
Background: DPP as a Community of Practice, Not Just a Program
DPP started with a unanimous answer to a question. In September 2024, parliamentarians from across the Caribbean gathered in Miami for a structured convening. During a brainstorm session, one question anchored the room: What is one project that could benefit every parliament in the region? The answer became the Digital Parliaments Project.
A little over a year later, that regional conversation has grown into a global one. DPP now brings together clerks, Hansard secretaries, and parliamentary staff from Jamaica, Saint Kitts & Nevis, Saint Lucia, Belize, Grenada, and Dominica — with active conversations underway as the project expands into Africa and beyond. Every quarter, the full cohort convenes to share updates, surface new needs, and learn from each other. Below are the full updates provided on our last quarterly call, held in March 2026.
The February 2026 Field Visits
In February 2026, the POPVOX Foundation team traveled to Saint Lucia and Dominica for the first in-country visits of a partnership that had been building virtually since 2024. A case study documenting both visits is forthcoming.
Built With Parliaments, Not Just For Them
At the center of DPP’s technological progress and implementation is ParlLink — an open-source digital platform for legislative data management, and the tip of the spear for a growing suite of parliamentary tools. ParlLink allows parliaments to upload their legislative documents, apply AI-powered optical character recognition (OCR) to digitize them, structure and enrich the resulting data, and surface it through application programming interfaces (APIs) that can power public-facing websites, research tools, and more. Over 4,000 documents have already been digitized through the platform — and the number grows every week.
What makes ParlLink different from a typical software deployment isn’t just what it does, it’s how it’s built. The DPP runs on a co-design model working directly with parliaments to design what fits their needs. The team behind it knows this world firsthand too, POPVOX Foundation’s staff are largely former Congressional staffers who’ve sat on the other side of this work.
The February visits made that visible in real time. Three features are now live on ParlLink that trace directly back to what the team observed and heard on the ground:
A tailored manual, built from scratch based on what partner parliaments needed, and housed within the platform itself for easy access
Multi-page scanning, developed after observing a specific challenge in the field: bound documents were being processed one page at a time by the technology rather than across a two-page spread; users can now manually review and correct how pages are read and train the ParlLink system in the process to ensure this issue is solved over time. This cuts the process time of digitization in half for processing bound volumes.
Customizable Member of Parliament profiles, allowing staff to maintain up to date information on MP parliamentary roles, titles, years of service, biography, contact information, political party and more
ParlLink AI Document Library Chat, a chatbot that allows parliamentary staff to query documents across their full library or within a specific document, surfacing relevant details instantly; it draws exclusively from data the parliament itself has uploaded, with no access to external sources
That last feature is particularly noteworthy. The ability to query an entire legislative archive through a conversational AI interface, instantly surfacing precedents, references, and related documents, was requested by Dominica's parliament during the February field visits. The POPVOX Foundation team built it within a week of returning, and was able to announce it on the quarterly call to the entire cohort. The technology to create this functionality to support parliamentary access to data exists today and can be achieved outside a multi-year, multi-million dollar procurement process. That's a different world than most people assume we're living in.
The data ParlLink generates doesn't have to stay inside the platform: its ownership is retained by the Parliament and is portable. In addition, it is available via API to automatically feed into additional applications. For example, many parliaments desire streamlined workflows for maintaining their public facing website. As part of DPP, POPVOX Foundation has created a Squarespace website template available to DPP partners that pulls data directly from ParlLink. For parliaments that have spent years without a modern, public-facing web presence, the barrier has never been ambition; it's been data. Now that ParlLink is generating structured, standardized legislative data, there's finally something to plug in. The template connects directly to ParlLink's APIs, meaning a parliament can go from zero to a live, data-powered public website without manual entry or a custom build.
The Pipeline: What Parliaments Are Asking For Next
The 2026 Q1 call also surfaced a set of needs now actively being explored for development. This feedback loop from parliamentary practitioners is what keeps the DPP roadmap parliament-driven:
Handwriting recognition: Several parliaments work with handwritten annotations on scanned Hansards, bills, and acts. OCR for handwritten documents is needed to capture this information in the digitization process.
Digital document stamps: Parliaments that use physical stamps to mark official receipt of documents raised the need for a digital equivalent.
Bulk transfer of existing digitized records: Some partners have collections already digitized in legacy systems and asked about migrating them into ParlLink. Individualized solutions need to be explored.
Tools for the Community
Beyond the ParlLink platform and the Quarterly Calls, DPP is building other connective tissue to solidify a long-term community of practice. DPPLink, the project's internal bimonthly newsletter, launched its first edition ahead of the 2026 Q1 call. A WhatsApp group is also now live for real-time connection across the cohort, questions, resource-sharing, and updates from partner parliaments as they happen.
To learn more about the Digital Parliaments Project or inquire about future phases, reach out to Chloe at chloe@popvox.org.