Money, Politics and Transparency, a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation, Global Integrity and the Electoral Integrity Project, is dedicated to improving access to information about party and campaign finances globally.

The next, and most important, piece of the project is you. The best way you can get involved is to join our Google Group so that we can start an ongoing, online global conversation between interested parties so we can share successes, failures, reform efforts, scandals, questions and answers.

A few months old, Money Politics and Transparency has already shared information about money’s impact on elections in the EU, Hungary, India, Ukraine and Egypt. We have designed a set of “Integrity Indicators” that we will use to assess the current state of political finance transparency in 50 countries. And we have begun research for in-depth, before-and-after case studies of countries that have reformed their political finance regulations during the last decade. At Sunlight Foundation’s TransparencyCamp, we facilitated a conversation among advocates from dozens of countries about tools, projects and citizen engagement initiatives that try to uncover the influence of money on politics and advocate for stronger political finance regimes.

Come meet us if you’re attending the upcoming OKFest in Berlin, so we can exchange ideas about creative ways to collect, use, disseminate and improve information about political finance. We will be sponsoring an interactive workshop on Thursday, July 17, to share transparency projects and technology tools that help uncover the influence of money on politics and identify next steps to move forward on improving transparency of political finance.

Ultimately, we hope to use the information we gather to join with global partners to create draft political finance transparency norms that can be used as a starting point by stakeholders to improve political finance systems in their own countries — creating an informed electorate, fostering accountability and helping to curb corruption.

Your participation will help us all better understand what is happening on the ground in terms political finance transparency. By sharing your stories, ideas and experiences we can all learn from one another. Anyone with an interest in improving transparency of political finance is welcome. Whether you are a civic hackers, transparency advocate, researcher, investigative journalist or regulator, you are welcome and encouraged to join the conversation.

Too often, political finance reform efforts take place in a vacuum, with reformers, politicians and the public never venturing outside their own borders for thoughts on how to improve things at home. Money, Politics and Transparency encourages you to break down those barriers by joining us here.