AT4AM, software for authoring and management of amendments on parliamentary texts used by the European Parliament, is available as free and open source software. The web site hosting the software was unveiled yesterday by EP vice-president Rainer Wieland, a German member of the EPP group.

AT4AM for All, the official name of the open source version, is available under the EUPL, the European Union's public licence.

"The European Parliament decided to use the knowledge and experience gained on AT4AM project to develop AT4AM for All primarily to help national parliaments to implement their own XML-based amendment authoring system."

Since its launch in 2010, AT4AM has been used to table more than 250,000 amendments in the EP, the EP news service reports. It quotes EP vice-president Rainer Wieland: "Due to this great success in the EP it was a logical consequence to release the source code and make it available to national parliaments in order to share a modern instrument for drafting activity with a minimal investment."

AT4AM is a web browser-based application that enables users to file, draft and edit amendments. All corrections and edits are automatically added to the original document, without any need to copy data or work on several files at the same time.

The software has been in use since February 2010 at the European Parliament, the AT4AM web site writes. "It is used by MEPs and their assistants, and advisors of the political groups to create and table amendments on the proposals of the European Commission and the Council of the European Union, and the reports of the parliamentary committees."

More information:
Europarl news item
At4am
Joinup news item
Joinup blog post